


Anachronism

by thirty2flavors



Category: Borderlands (Video Games)
Genre: Accidental Time Travel, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Drama, Ensemble Cast, F/M, Gen, Sexual Content, not borderlands 3 compliant, post-tftbl
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-15
Updated: 2019-08-11
Packaged: 2019-10-10 10:54:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 52,661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17424527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thirty2flavors/pseuds/thirty2flavors
Summary: The Vault of the Traveler puts Rhys and Fiona right back where they came from.More or less.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I tried to tag the three relationships that will get most of the spotlight, but at its core this will be a pretty team-oriented piece, so any and all combinations of the four. 
> 
> A big thanks to [@nowrunalong](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nowrunalong/pseuds/nowrunalong) for giving this a read-through and letting me know how well the set up works (or doesn't).

“My eye’s not working.”

Bent double, with her hands braced against her knees and her stomach roiling, Fiona still found the time to look up at Rhys and glare incredulously. “What?”

“My eye,” he repeated, like it was her hearing at fault, and not his own logic. “It’s not connecting to the EchoNet. It says—”

“I feel like I got put through a blender,” Fiona interrupted, “and you’re trying to check your messages?”

“I was running diagnostics! That was…” He frowned. “What was that, anyway?”

“No idea.” Fiona tried to straighten up, but the world spun; she wrenched her eyes shut again and leaned against a nearby rock instead. “We touched the glowy box, and there was a flash, and then—” She mimed an explosion with her hand. “Blender.”

Rhys scratched the back of his head. “Is that supposed to happen?”

“How the hell should I know?”

“You’re the vault hunter.”

“It’s my first vault, all right? Cut me some slack.” She peeked up at him for a second before clasping a hand over her face. “God, my _head_. How are you fine? I feel like you shouldn’t be fine.”

“I’m not. I told you, my eye won’t connect—”

Fiona’s eyes felt like they might pop out of their sockets from behind. “So not the same, Inspector Gadget.” 

“—which is a real shame, because I don’t know where the hell we are. Is this Pandora?”

“Sure smells like it.” 

“Then where is… everything? Where’s everyone else?” 

For the first time, there was enough alarm in his voice to cut through her irritation. She opened her eyes, squinting around through the dusk light. Her suspicions about Pandora were correct—there was Elpis, shining high and bright in the night sky—but Rhys had a point: there was nothing around them but a field of dirt and rock. Evidence of the battle, their friends, the Traveler and its loot… All of it was gone.

A new feeling of nausea swam through Fiona’s belly. 

“Wasn’t it daytime?” With every word Rhys’ voice pitched higher in anxiety. “It was definitely daytime, and now it’s not.” 

Fiona’s head pounded, and she could no longer tell if the magic box was at fault. She pushed herself away from the rock, only to realize with a start that it was the base of the stone archway at the mouth of the vault. The top of the arch had crumbled away, but there was nothing on the ground. 

She decided to do what she always did with things she didn’t know how to process: package it away and deal with it later. 

“Let’s just find the others and see what’s going on.”

* * *

“Quite a gate you got there.” Sasha stepped out of her caravan with a bag slung over her shoulders and a nod back towards the structure looming overhead. “Trouble with the neighbors?”

“Something like that.” Vaughn grimaced as he walked to greet her. “Don’t say ‘I told you so’.”

“Well, I did.” She shrugged, and the contents of her bag clanged together. “Pandora’s not an open-doors kind of place.”

“Still. You try to be friendly…” He sighed. There was no use arguing with Sasha about the best way to deal with raids; plenty of people around Helios were already happy to do it for her. Instead, he held out his hand to take her bag, a gesture that was sure to be ignored but felt right anyway. “Thanks for bringing all this, by the way.”

As he’d predicted, her own grip on the bag tightened. “Sounded urgent.” Sasha shrugged again. “Besides, I need that part for the caravan. Thought it might break down on the way here.”

Vaughn rolled his eyes. There was necessary risk, and then there was stupidity. “Why didn’t you tell me that? I could’ve sent a runner to—”

“Don’t start,” she warned, the prickle in her voice enough to fend him off for now. “Where do you want all this, anyway?”

“Supply room.” Vaughn beckoned for her to follow down the labyrinthine hallways. “Come on, we’ve got something I think you’ll like.”

* * *

_**ERROR:** Unable to connect to server. Software update required. _

_**ERROR:** Software update failed. Please connect to server._

_**ERROR:** Unable to connect to server. Software update required._

Rhys growled in frustration as he rubbed his cybernetic eye with the heel of his hand, a futile gesture that accomplished nothing but at least felt sort of satisfying.

Any attempt to connect to the EchoNet kickstarted an endless chain of recursive error messages. Diagnostics tests were equally unhelpful, and his arm fared no better. Over and over again, dialogue boxes recommended software updates he couldn’t install.

“If you tell me about your eye one more time I’m going to rip it out of the socket myself,” Fiona grumbled, and so Rhys settled for mumbling swear words to himself. 

It just didn’t make sense. Rhys had always taken good—well... decent—care of his cybernetics, but in the wake of recent events, he was downright meticulous. Half of what he ran was custom code, and he’d had a lot of time for troubleshooting, stuck on his own for months at the Atlas facility. Everything had been working just fine, even after being dragged through the desert by a well-meaning but misguided robot. So why was it acting up now? He hadn't even done anything. Maybe piloting Gortys had interfered somehow…

“How do we get in again?” Fiona asked. “There’s like, a back way, or something, right?”

Rhys looked up from irritably jabbing at the with the error messages on his palm display. Several feet in front of them was a solid metal gate, fifteen feet high, connected in to the walls of what was once Helios. 

“I... thought this was the back way,” he said slowly.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” said Fiona, and Rhys couldn’t argue with that. But she shrugged. “Whatever. You think they got a doorbell, or…?”

She needn’t finish the thought. 

“What do you want?” shouted down a voice that ought to have been far more intimidating for the job it was doing. A head appeared at the top of the door, peering down at them from a crude-looking battlement. 

“Door-to-door sales,” Fiona called back. “Wanna buy some knives?”

The person at the top of the door didn’t laugh. “Why are you dressed like that?”

“Part of the uniform,” Fiona answered. “You should see what they used to make him wear—”

“Look, we just got a bit turned around after the vault,” Rhys intervened, not interested in spending the night outside because Fiona got into an argument with the doorman. “Can you let us in?”

There was a momentary silence from the top of the gate. “After the… what?”

Beside him, Fiona massaged her temple, her patience fraying. “Oh, for the love of…”

“Uh, the vault?” Rhys repeated, his uneasiness ceding ground to agitation. “Big alien treasure trove? Tons of people involved? Pretty hard to miss. What, was that not your shift or something?”

For another concerning minute, the person at the top of the door was silent. And then they said, “Just… stay there a minute, I’m gonna… get someone,” and disappeared from view.

* * *

“Oh my god, you’ve got a _Volcano_.”

An awed smile stretched across Sasha’s face, the widest Vaughn had seen in such a long time that he felt accomplished for having won it. She dropped her heavy bag onto the floor and reached for the gun, fingers hovering reverently over the barrel before she picked it up.

“Thought you might like it,” said Vaughn, choosing to disregard the smugness he heard in his own voice. 

“It’s _beautiful_ ,” she cooed. “Where the hell did you get one?”

“Took it off someone in the last raid.” 

Sasha snorted. “His loss.” She hoisted the gun to eye level, peering down the scope experimentally. “Man, you could really do some damage with this thing.”

Memories of the smell of burnt flesh came to mind, and Vaughn grimaced. “Yeah, well, he did.” But Vaughn waved away the thought—and Sasha’s look of concern—as quick as it’d come. “So, you want it?”

The frown that had begun to pool on her lips vanished entirely, replaced by surprise. “Huh?” 

“I mean, you’re cradling it like a firstborn over here, so I thought…”

A Sasha off her game was as rare a sight as Sasha smiling. Her arms stretched out to return the gun as though of their own accord. “No, I can’t. Why would…?”

“You know our policy.”

“It’s a stupid policy.” 

“Besides,” he continued, “you’ll make better use of it. You’re the best shot I know.” 

Sasha opened her mouth to argue but caught herself before she made a sound, a familiar cloud passing over her face. She dropped her gaze back to the gun, worrying her bottom lip before she sighed in resignation. “I’ll do another supply run for you. I’ve got a job coming up outside Sanctuary, but after that—”

Vaughn took advantage of her wrong-footedness to clap her on the shoulder. “Dude, just say thanks.”

She looked at the hand on her shoulder before meeting his eyes. “Thanks.”

“There we go,” said Vaughn, and then he laughed. “That part you needed is over here. You sure Janey’s shop didn’t have it?”

Sasha avoided his eyes as she slung the Volcano over her shoulder and pulled her long braids out from under the strap. “I… was heading this way anyway.”

“So that’s an ‘I don’t know, I didn’t ask’,” he reasoned. 

“Vaughn,” she grit out, a simple but effective warning.

Perhaps he was pushing his luck a bit. 

“Hey, it’s fine, it’s good to see you. It’s been a while.” He cleared his throat and gestured to a box on the middle shelf. “Uh, I think it’s in there. I’m not really sure what it—”

“Got it,” said Sasha near-immediately. “Thanks.”

The device she pulled from the box looked more like a tenth-grade science project than a piece for a functioning vehicle. Vaughn scratched his beard. “You sure that caravan’s still, uh, road safe?”

“Well, it will be, with this and a bit of elbow grease.” Stowing the part away in her inventory, she wiped her hands on her pants. “I should be gone before morning.”

It was what Vaughn had expected her to say, almost down to a script. 

“You could stay a few days," he said. "Take a break.”

Sasha’s eyes narrowed impatiently. “Vaughn, we’ve been over this.”

“We’ve got spare beds. _Actual_ beds. I know they’ve gotta be more comfortable than driving around.”

“I sleep just fine,” Sasha insisted. (A little rich, coming from someone whose face was thin and drawn in a way Vaughn recognized as perpetual exhaustion; it was a look he saw in the mirror, often enough.) “And you know this place makes me wanna blow my brains out.” She paused. “Uh, no offense.”

“Not... really sure how to not be offended by that,” said Vaughn. But he was undeterred. “Just stay for the night. We can help you with the caravan tomorrow. Are you hungry? I usually eat around now. We can get you some food—”

“Whoa.” Sasha held up one hand to stop him, the other resting on her hip. “What’s going on? You _know_ I just came here to get the part, why are you being so weird?” Her eyes widened. “Is that why you gave me the gun? Are you trying to guilt me into a sleepover?”

“No! No, that was… just... ”

But he’d floundered, and Sasha was too sharp to let it slide. 

“Bullshit.” A threatening crease appeared on her forehead. “You’re trying to butter me up. Why?”

He’d definitely pushed his luck now. “No, no, I was just—”

“Did you even need any of that stuff?” She waved at the bag of supplies sitting on the floor. 

“Well… I mean, we _always_ need supplies, so technically... ”

“Vaughn.” They were eye to eye when she stepped forward. “What are you not telling me?”

After everything, Vaughn liked to think he knew Sasha well. Better than just about anybody. So he knew, whatever she might be saying, there was nothing more likely to scare her away right now than honesty.

He wasn’t sure what other choice he had.

“Okay, okay, you’re right, the gun was a bribe and I lied. A little.” He sighed under the heat of her stare, shoulders drooping. “I just… wanted you to be here. Today.” 

“Today? Why?” And then the penny dropped. “Oh.” Sasha’s whole posture changed. “Shit.” She stepped back and turned away from him, face hidden behind her long hair. “I didn’t even… I’ve been on the road. I lose track.” 

Vaughn doubted the track had been lost so much as it had been purposefully misplaced, but he wasn’t about to correct her. He could dress it up in his head as much as he wanted, pretend he was doing her some act of kindness or charity, but the reality of it was less glamorous. He’d brought her to a place she hated on a day she tried to forget for his own selfish reasons. 

“I’m sorry,” he said quietly. He looked down at his shoes, the guilt he’d been keeping at bay seeping over the barriers. “I didn’t think you’d come if I told you the truth.”

“I wouldn’t have.” 

She turned her head, just enough to see him in her periphery, and Vaughn watched her wrestle with it, her self-preservation versus her pity. Normally, Vaughn would resent being pitied. Today, he’d take what he could get.

Sasha's deliberation ended with a tired sigh, and she turned to face him properly. “I’ll stay for tonight," she conceded. "But I’m leaving tomorrow morning, once I fix up the caravan.”

Though small, Vaughn’s smile was drenched in relief and gratitude. “Thank you.”

“Sure.” She titled her head, all easy nonchalance, but her knuckles were pale where she gripped the strap of her gun. “Now, I think you promised me food?”

Vaughn’s smile grew wider. "Right! Yeah!" That part, thankfully, was easy to deliver on. “You know, we’ve had a bit of luck with the greenhouse, so—” Static buzzed in his ear, interrupting his train of thought as his ECHO comm sprang to life. He raised a hand to answer. “Hello?”

“Uh… hi,” came an anxious voice on the other end of the line. “Can you come to the gate? There’s something going on here I think you should see.”

Vaughn frowned. He looked over at Sasha, watching him with her head tilted curiously. “Kinda busy, can it wait?”

“Um… no,” was the answer. “Sorry, but I _really_ think you should see this.” 

Vaughn held back a series of impatient replies and settled for making a face at Sasha. “All right, fine, be there in a minute.” He dropped the call and shrugged at her apologetically. “Sorry, something’s up at the gate, they want me to check it out.”

Sasha raised an eyebrow. “Another raid?”

Vaughn laughed, but it was humourless. “I hope not.” He wrinkled his nose. “And it better not be two skags having sex again, that was not a sound I needed in my brain.”

Unphased by either option, Sasha shrugged. “Well, let’s go check it out.” In one smooth motion, the sniper rifle was in her hands. “I got your back.”

* * *

The person at the door had only been gone a minute before Fiona threw her head back and groaned at the sky. “How did Helios stay up there so long with this many idiots running around inside it?”

Rhys decided it was in everyone’s best interest to let that slide. 

A breeze rolled through, swirling the top layer of sand like a fine mist. Rhys folded his arms tight, an ineffectual guard against the shiver that shot down his spine. Pandoran evenings weren’t exactly cold, but there was something about standing on the wrong side of an imposing door in the middle of the desert that made the hair on the back of his neck prickle. 

“Do you feel weird?” he asked Fiona. “I feel weird. I don’t like this.”

Fiona wasn’t listening. She walked right up to the door and threw herself against it.

It didn’t budge.

Rhys raised his eyebrow. “Really?”

She shrugged. “Worth a shot.” 

But she rubbed her shoulder as she stood up again. Craning her neck, she peered up at the top of the door, the gears in her mind turning. 

“Give me a boost,” she said after a minute.

He snorted. “How tall do you think I am?”

“Well, do your thing, then,” she said. When he only stared at her blankly, she flailed her right arm about. “Y’know. Your hack-y thing.”

Rhys was agog. “Do you even listen to anything I say?”

“I try not to.”

“I _can’t_. My—”

A metal clang interrupted him as a panel slid open on the door, just big enough for them to see the masked face on the other side. Rhys’ shoulders tensed instinctively.

He didn’t like masks.

“Okay, what is this?" When they spoke, their voice was hidden too, modulated out of sorts. "A trick? A joke?” 

“A joke?” Fiona repeated. “‘Two frauds walk into a vault…’” She pretended to contemplate it. “But what would the punchline be?” 

Deciphering any expression behind the mask was impossible. 

Fiona flashed a smile destined for sales. “So you gonna let us in, or…?”

Movement overhead drew Rhys’ eye as someone new appeared at the top of the door. He caught a glimpse of long brown hair—and then the muzzle of a very large gun pointed in his direction.

So much for laser pointers.

“Seriously,” the person in the mask was saying, “whatever this is—whatever you’re trying to do here—”

“You mean come in?” said Fiona. 

“—this is really not a good day to try me, so—”

“Not a good day to try _you_? Buddy, we killed a gigantic teleporting monster just to get VIP access to the galaxy’s worst fast travel station.” 

Fiona’s false cheer was growing more fraught by the minute, but Rhys was starting to tune her out, distracted by the sniper rifle aimed at his head. If he could just get his stupid eye to _work…_

“Look, can we just talk to Vaughn, please?” Fiona was asking. 

Maybe it couldn’t scan, it could still zoom—

“You must know Vaughn, right?”

The sniper was a woman, Rhys realized. She had a handkerchief around her neck, pulled up over her nose to cover her mouth. The hair on the right side of her head was shaved short, and there was a deep line of concentration on her forehead. 

“Short guy, shockingly jacked?” 

The sniper tilted her head, staring back at Rhys around the scope. As she did, one earring poked out from behind her handkerchief. His jaw dropped.

“He’s like your mayor or king or something.” 

For the second time in less than an hour, Rhys felt like he’d been tossed into a cosmic blender. 

“Just find him and tell him that—”

He reached forward blindly, fumbling for Fiona without taking his eyes off the sniper.

“Fi,” Rhys managed hoarsely. “Fi, look…”

His fingertips brushed the leather of her sleeve, and Fiona turned to him. “What?” She followed the direction of his stare, but her angle was wrong, and without the augmented eye, she couldn’t see the sniper like Rhys could. “What’s got you all weird?”

Rhys didn’t know how to answer her, but his voice had stopped working anyway. With what felt like a monumental effort, he looked from the sniper to the person in the mask. His eye couldn't scan them properly, and he couldn't see more of them than the mask, but Rhys knew with sudden certainty who was on the other side of the door.

“Rhys?” Fiona gave his arm a rough tug, gripping his sleeve. Jarringly and uncharacteristic, a note of panic had finally crept into Fiona’s voice. “Someone tell me what’s going on, right now.”

“That’s what I’d like to know,” said the modulated voice—and then the mask came off, and sure enough there was Vaughn, more lines on his face than Rhys had ever seen. “Where the hell have you two been for the last twelve years?”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Reunited and it... doesn’t feel so good, actually.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another huge thanks to @nowrunalong for the beta! Always helping me find problem areas and preventing me from impulse posting shitty first drafts.
> 
> Also upped the chapter count estimation, since chapter two ended up only covering two of the four scenes I had planned for it. I'm long-winded.

Déjà-vu clouded Rhys’ mind as Vaughn opened the gate. It didn’t clear when he stepped into an unrecognizable Helios, when Sasha walked down the stairs with an outfit and hairstyle he’d never seen before, or even when Vaughn crushed him in a hug Rhys was too stunned to return. His brain, like his cybernetics, couldn’t connect properly to the world around him. 

Missing. Thought you were dead. Never thought I’d see you again.

Hadn’t they just had this conversation?

“Twelve years?” Fiona’s voice filtered through like a foghorn in an adjacent harbor, audible but difficult to make out. “What do you mean, twelve years? It can’t have been twelve years.”

“Well, it was.” Sasha watched them all from the base of the staircase and made no move to get closer, her expression inscrutable. The gun that had been pointed at Rhys’ head was strapped to her back, virtually the same size as she was. Even as she addressed Vaughn, her eyes were locked on Fiona. “Look, can we take this somewhere else before your weirdo peanut gallery comes out and asks for a blessing?”

Vaughn broke away from the hug just as Rhys’ arms finally began to move. “Uh… yeah.” He sniffed. “Yeah! Come with me.”

They all trailed behind Vaughn in brittle silence. More than once, Fiona looked over her shoulder, studying Sasha in disbelief, but Sasha kept silent and stonyfaced, staring straight ahead. Rhys fixated on the streaks of gray running through Vaughn’s ponytail. 

Twelve years. Vaughn would be forty by now. 

Rhys supposed that meant he was, too. Technically. Was that how it worked? Was it the cumulative years elapsed since birth that counted, or was it just the ones you knew of? What was the precedent for this? 

Vaughn brought them to a retrofitted office. Moderately sized, it was about as big as Rhys’ had been, back before the promotion and Vasquez and the fake Vault Key deal—but beyond its structure it was unrecognizable. All the stark Hyperion furnishings had long been overtaken by a very Pandoran mishmash, like a weed growing out of a concrete sidewalk. 

Dizzy, Rhys sank into the first chair he saw. 

No one took the empty seat beside him. Fiona stopped at his side but remained standing, clutching the back of his chair. Vaughn stood across from him, half-sitting on the edge of an old desk covered by a stained tarp. Sasha walked to the furthest corner of the room, gripping the strap of her gun. 

“Okay,” said Vaughn, once everyone had settled into place. “So… what happened? Where have you guys been?”

“Nowhere,” said Fiona. Rhys felt a rush of gratitude for her continued ability to use words. “We haven’t been anywhere. We were with all of you, and then we went into the vault. It was a big cavernous room, and there was a staircase leading to a giant chest. We opened it together and then—and then I don’t know. We were outside again, only it was nighttime, and we walked back here, and then…” She gestured all around her. “Here we are.”

Vaughn frowned. “That’s it?”

“That’s it,” Fiona confirmed. She nudged Rhys’ shoulder. “Right?”

Rhys nodded. “That… that about sums it up, yeah.” He cleared his throat. “What happened here?”

An uncomfortable beat of silence followed. Vaughn looked over at Sasha, whose expression was unchanged, but she said nothing.

“You were just… gone,” said Vaughn. “Athena noticed first. We looked up from the loot and the vault was… closed, or something. Just a big empty arch, and you two were nowhere to be found.”

Sasha caught Rhys’ eye for the first time, and the memory of their last reunion hit him like a freight train. A wide smile and a tight hug—so unlike her sister Rhys had been stunned. Even when he’d been indulging in daydream scenarios back at Atlas just to keep himself moving, he’d never dared imagine she’d be as happy to see him as he was to see her. 

There was none of that familiarity on her face now. Throat tight, he looked away first. 

“We couldn’t figure out what happened,” Vaughn continued. “We didn’t know if you’d… if something had happened, if you were stuck inside, or if it—if it teleported you somewhere, or…” He trailed off. “We looked, at first. For a long time. For years. But there were no leads to follow, and eventually…” He looked over at Sasha nervously again before he shrugged. “Eventually life goes on.”

Fiona’s fingers found Rhys’ shoulder and dug in. 

Life goes on. A broad brushstroke to paint over more than a decade of lost time, time in which everyone Rhys knew had carried on without him. He suddenly felt very small.

“So there was nothing in the vault?” asked Sasha, breaking her silence at last. 

“You mean besides the shitty time travel?” Fiona answered. “No.”

“Sure about that?”

“What?” 

“Just wondered if maybe something slipped your mind.” Sasha folded her arms across her chest, a standoffish pose signalling danger despite its nonchalance. “Wouldn’t be the first time.” 

Judging from the look on Fiona’s face, she had no better idea what was going on than Rhys did. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I told you—”

Vaughn interrupted with a sigh. “Sasha, they just got back. Maybe—”

“ _Just?_ ” There was definitely some danger in her voice now. “It’s been twelve years.” 

“Exactly.” Vaughn sounded terse himself. “So maybe you could hold off on jumping to conclusions for another hour—”

“Oh, fuck you!” snapped Sasha.

Rhys felt it like a burst of adrenaline. His eyebrows shot up. “Whoa, what?” 

“Okay.” Fiona was loud enough to cut through as she stepped back in her self-appointed leadership role. “My head feels like someone took a meat cleaver to it and I’ve had a hell of a long week—”

Sasha snorted. “Have you?” 

“—so will you please do me a favour, cut to the chase and tell me what you’re getting at?” 

In the beat of silence that followed, Rhys looked between the three of them in alarm. Hands raised in surrender, Vaughn shrugged, the universal gesture for _I’m staying out of it_. Sasha’s face was fierce and set as she watched Fiona from the corner of the room. 

“Like he said, we looked for you. For a while.” There was something treacherous in Sasha’s measured voice, a powerful riptide beneath a smooth surface. “Found Felix, actually.”

Fiona’s hand fell away from Rhys’ shoulder. 

“He had a weird story,” Sasha went on. “Said he’d spoken to you, actually, just before we opened the vault. Said you’d asked for his help. He even—and this is where it gets really ridiculous—told me he’d given you money for the both of us. Nine million dollars, in fact.” 

Rhys expected Fiona to look as confused as he felt. Instead she brushed her hand through her hair and looked down at the ground. 

“‘Course, I knew he was full of shit, like always. I mean, I know you. You would have told me if you’d spoken to Felix, and you definitely wouldn’t keep that kind of money for yourself. Right?”

The veneer of confidence coating everything Fiona said and did had begun to rub away. “Sash, I can explain.” 

“I never would’ve believed him,” said Sasha. “Not for a second.” The edge in her voice growing sharper with every passing minute. “Except that Loader Bot was there, too. Said he’d seen the whole thing. Seems like Felix was telling the truth, for once in his life.” 

“Hold on,” said Rhys, staring up at Fiona incredulously. “You’ve got _nine million dollars_? Like, right now?” 

“She didn’t tell you either?” Sasha raised an eyebrow, a tiny flicker of genuine surprise on her face. “Interesting. Thought maybe you two were in cahoots.”

“Told you,” muttered Vaughn.

Sasha glared at him. “Stay out of it.” 

“Cahoots?” Fiona spluttered. “What’d you think, we stole whatever was inside and ran away together?”

“Doesn’t seem out of the question.”

Fiona scoffed. “That’s ridiculous.” 

“Maybe it is,” Sasha conceded. “I mean, clearly you don’t like to share.” 

Fiona rolled her eyes so emphatically her whole head tilted backwards. “Sasha, I was going to tell you.”

Sasha snorted. “Of course you were.”

“Of course I was!” Fiona shouted, desperate and agitated. “I was waiting until after we got rid of the super dangerous vault monster, because I knew if I told you beforehand you’d be distracted.”

Sasha rolled her eyes. “Bullshit.”

“It’s true,” Fiona insisted. “You let your emotions run away with you, you always have—”

“Bullshit!”

“—and what we were doing was too big a risk. I needed your head in the game so you didn’t get yourself killed.” Fiona’s expression turned sour. “For all the good that did. I wasn’t trying to hide anything, I was just looking out for you, like I always have to. ”

“Looking out for me?” The explanation did nothing to quell the fire simmering in Sasha’s eyes. “That what happened in the vault, too? You went after the treasure on your own because you were 'looking out for me'?” 

Fiona’s own frustration was coming to a boil. “I cannot _believe_ you think this was all some sort of grand scheme to—to cut you out of the will.” 

Sasha stepped forward, shoulders squared and muscles tensed. For as long as Rhys had known her, Sasha had been deceptively strong, but now she was downright wiry, the lines of her body sharper than he remembered. 

“You know, it’s not even about the money,” said Sasha, quieter now that she was closer. “People get crazy about cash, I get it. Maybe once you had it in your hands you decided you didn’t want to share after all.”

“You’re being stupid,” Fiona ground out, eyes narrowed. “You know me better than that.”

“You’ve spent your whole life lying to people,” Sasha shot back. “What was stupid was thinking I was the exception to the rule.” 

“If you would stop acting like a teenager and just _listen_ —”

“A teenager?!”

Their voices had risen so loud that Rhys cringed away. Vaughn was studying the patch of ground by his feet, looking troubled but not surprised. 

Fiona drew herself up, utilizing all of her extra inch of height. “I think I’ve earned a little benefit of the doubt after everything I’ve done for you.”

“Everything you’ve done for me? You left—”

“You want to talk about leaving?” Fiona sneered, thick and cutting. “You died in my arms, Sasha! I didn’t know what was going to happen in the vault, but you—you made that choice, you made me say goodbye to you—”

“ _Shut up!_ ” Sasha cried, and Fiona flinched and went quiet. “Ever since we were little, Felix liked you more than me. He trusted you with the hardest jobs, he asked your help with the planning. When he left, I felt stupid for ever thinking he’d stay. You were always his favourite, and now I know why. You’re just like him.” 

Mouth ajar, Fiona took a step back, ceding ground. “Sasha…”

Sasha was shaking, her hands balled into fists at her side. 

“You tracked him down with an olive branch and didn’t even tell me it was happening. You had a fucking family reunion and I wasn’t even on the guest list!” Vulnerability bled through the crack in her voice. “I trusted you. I thought you were on my side. And you took nine million dollars and you went into a vault without me and you left me behind.”

In the heavy silence that followed, Rhys exchanged an uncomfortable look with Vaughn and then stared at his shoes. They were intruding on something personal, but there was no way out now, nothing they could do to help. 

What felt like an eternity passed before Fiona found her voice again, rough as it was. 

“I _am_ on your side, Sasha.” She closed the distance between her and her sister, placing her hands cautiously on both of Sasha’s shoulders. “I always have been.” 

Stiff as a board, Sasha froze, watching her sister’s painted nails with her lips pulled together in contemplation. Looking as though she’d been wrung out, she said nothing. 

“I didn’t mean to leave you. I never would,” Fiona went on, encouraged by Sasha’s quiet. “And I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about Felix sooner. I wanted to, I thought about it, I was just...”

Struggling for the right words, Fiona paused. In the beat of silence, Sasha met her eyes. 

“Protecting me?” she suggested. 

“Well, yeah.” Fiona grinned. “Been doing it my whole life, kind of a hard habit to break.”

Fiona squeezed Sasha’s shoulders, and for a second some of the tension in the air dissipated. 

“That’s why Felix said he did it too,” said Sasha slowly, like she was processing it as she spoke. “Told me he needed the betrayal to feel real so he could protect us from Vallory.” 

A cloud passed over her face, and she shook her head. 

“It’s been twelve years, Fiona. I don’t need your protection anymore.” She shrugged out of of Fiona’s grip. “Frankly, I don’t want it.” 

Too stunned to say anything, Fiona let her mouth hang open and her hand hover in the air where Sasha had been just a second ago. 

“Keep the money, I don’t care,” said Sasha, brusque and distant as she adjusted the strap on her shoulder and looked back at Vaughn. “I’m fixing my ride and heading out. I’ve got to meet my client anyway.” On her way to the door, she paused and addressed Rhys from behind a wall of ice as thick as a glacier. “Welcome back.”

* * *

The silence that followed Sasha’s departure lasted a minute but felt like an eternity. Fiona had avoided eye contact with Rhys and Vaughn, fingers flexing at her side. Then she’d lifted her chin, turned to Vaughn and spoke as if nothing had happened.

“You got a spare room or something I can use?” she asked, casual enough to give Rhys whiplash. “My head’s killing me.”

“Uh… yeah!” said Vaughn, whose recovery was not nearly as quick or convincing. “Yeah, for sure.” 

The bank of spare rooms—kept, Vaughn explained, for the odd traders and merchants who came from too far away to make the journey back—was not far down the hall from where they’d been. Rhys was pretty sure, though he elected not to ask, that they were the same set of rooms he and Fiona and the others had stayed in just the night previous.

Or the night twelve years ago. Whichever.

Fiona disappeared into the first available room with barely a backwards glance. “Thanks.” She flipped her wrist in a lazy wave. “See ya.” 

Then she shut the door, leaving Rhys alone with Vaughn, and he felt a momentary flash of panic.

Talking to Vaughn had always felt like slipping on a pair of old shoes: easy, comfortable, familiar, occasionally an excuse to avoid leaving your comfort zone. It was one of Rhys’ favourite things about Vaughn, a stalwart companion in the uncertain seas of college and Hyperion and Pandora. 

But twelve years was a long time. Twelve years was longer than their entire friendship. What if those shoes didn’t fit anymore? What if the sole had worn through? What if—

“Well,” said Vaughn, breaking the silence first as he stepped away from Fiona’s door and hopefully out of her earshot, “that probably could’ve gone better.”

“Probably?” Rhys half laughed. He felt like he’d run an emotional marathon, and he hadn’t even been involved. “I’m not sure it could’ve gone worse.”

Vaughn made a face. “Yeah, well, Sasha’s been holding that in for a while.”

“Sounded like it,” Rhys mumbled. He rubbed the back of his neck. “She really thought we meant to disappear?”

Vaughn led them down the hall as he contemplated the question, a small but familiar frown on his lips. Once upon a time, Rhys had known it as his _how do I put this?_ frown, the sort Vaughn wore when he was trying to be diplomatic. Rhys had seen it many times: when he got his tattoos, when he’d announced his intention to have his arm replaced, just about every Friday night in college. 

“When you guys first disappeared, we considered pretty much every possibility except that one,” Vaughn said. “But then we ran into Felix, and he told us about the money, and Sasha…” 

Vaughn hesitated, and it struck Rhys that he looked caught between loyalties. 

That was new. Usually Vaughn’s loyalty to Rhys trumped just about everything.

“I don’t think she knew how to process it,” said Vaughn finally. “After that, she was convinced there was only one explanation, that you guys were gone because you didn’t want to be found. We… argued a lot.” He flashed Rhys an encouraging smile that achieved the opposite. “I knew you guys didn’t do it on purpose.” His smile faded. “Well. I knew _you_ wouldn’t.”

“Neither would Fiona,” said Rhys quickly, defensive for reasons he couldn’t articulate. He shoved the nine million dollar question mark to a dusty but increasingly crowded corner of his mind. “That’s not what happened.”

Vaughn raised his palms in surrender. “Hey, hey, you don’t have to convince me.” Then his expression softened. “It’s really good to have you back, man.”

The crinkles in the corner of Vaughn’s eyes were new, weren’t they? Or maybe they were just deeper than they had been. Rhys couldn’t remember. The beard definitely had more gray in it. How long had that been there? Had Vaughn panicked when he first noticed, or was that kind of vanity too low on the list of Pandoran priorities to get any traction? More than once, Rhys had joked that Vaughn was doomed to go gray first, because he worried too much. Had Vaughn thought of that when it happened? 

“Uh, Rhys?” asked Vaughn. “Are you okay?”

Rhys’ chest and throat felt tight, but he nodded and tried to sound casual. “Uh, yeah. Yeah, I’m—I’m glad to be back. I guess. I mean, I didn’t really know I left, but…” 

He finished with a shrug and his most convincing grin. Vaughn frowned again, but he didn’t press.

“Yeah…” he said slowly. “Well, hey, do you want the tour? This place is pretty different from the last time you were here.” 

“That sounds great!” said Rhys, a little too cheery. “I’d love to see what you did with the ol’ fixer-upper.” 

He tried not to wonder if Vaughn felt as desperate as he did for a reliable source of conversation.

On their first day working for Hyperion, Rhys, Vaughn and about twenty other new recruits were given a guided tour of the station. 

The tour itself had been short and to-the-point: the Hub of Heroism, a whirlwind tour of the entry-level offices, a printed brochure highlighting all the floors to avoid if you didn’t want to end up on the wrong end of an airlock. Vaughn had complained afterwards that the tour left out crucial details like where to buy food and where normal people lived, but Rhys had been starstruck by all of it, awed by his own employee badge and thrilled at the chance to be a cog in such a grand machine.

The tour Vaughn was giving him now was much different.

He’d been right to say the station had totally changed. Most of what Rhys saw was unrecognizable to him, buried under too many new coats of paint, literal and metaphorical, to be identified. Pandora had claimed Helios, and now they’d fused into something inextricable from each other.

With every new room, Vaughn referenced some remarkable feat as though it were nothing. 

“We’ve had a bit of luck with irrigation, finally,” Vaughn would explain. Or, “We got a water treatment system running.” 

Instituted some community policies. Made shaky alliances with some nearby settlements, brokered trade deals with them.

It was all very impressive, no matter how casually presented. Rhys slipped into the role of captive audience like a second skin, oohing and ahhing in all the right spots, asking the right mix of questions to seem attentive and interested. Years of sales experience had him well-equipped.

But a cold feeling had slithered up from his stomach and wrapped itself around his ribcage, squeezing his heart and lungs from the inside. He’d expected to shake it off, to smother it down, but the longer Vaughn showed him around, the worse it got.

Rhys reasoned that it was the fault of all the nosy strangers they kept passing. Whispers and double-takes followed them through the halls, despite Vaughn’s stern stares and efforts to shoo them away. 

“Cult worship is totally overrated,” said Rhys, after one woman stopped in front of him, stared with wide eyes for twenty seconds, and then ran away without having spoken. 

“Yeah…” Vaughn rubbed his neck apologetically. “It was kind of dying down, but popping back up again, twelve years later, looking exactly the same? That _is_ pretty remarkable. You’ve probably just encouraged them.”

Rhys rolled his eyes. “Wonderful, I’ll keep that in mind next time I want a second date.” As they passed another curious onlooker, though, his shoulders sagged and he lowered his voice. “They know this was an accident, don’t they? Like, all of it. It wasn’t some kind of—of—planned liberation or—or performance art, it was just…” Now that he was saying it, the words were all jumbled up. “I mean, people died. A lot of them. They have to realize that, right? I mean, they were there.” 

Vaughn only shrugged. “They’re still Hyperion. Historically, body count has been considered an asset.” 

The icy feeling in Rhys’ chest tightened its hold on his heart. 

Totally oblivious—or maybe entirely too perceptive—Vaughn clapped a hand on his shoulder. “But hey, on the bright side, we got rid of that Jack statue. Well… not so much ‘got rid of’ as ‘people tried to resculpt it to a better likeness of you and it totally crumbled’, but still. It’s gone now. So that’s good.” 

“Great,” choked out Rhys, offering a thumbs up in lieu of sincerity. He eyed the nearest corner and made a beeline for it. “Hey, uh, what’s over here?” 

The question wound up being rhetorical, because the answer wound up being obvious: almost a dozen different vehicles, parked around the room in various states of road worthiness. Sticking out like an eyesore at the back was a ratty old caravan that looked like someone had tried to digistruct a child’s drawing.

“Wow, dude, I can’t believe you have the universe’s first car, that’s amazing,” he joked, nudging Vaughn with his elbow. 

“That’s Sasha’s,” said Vaughn.

Rhys blanched. “Oh.”

“She’s fixing it up,” Vaughn assured him, in a tone of voice that meant he was reassuring himself more than Rhys. Sensing the magnetic force pulling Rhys toward destruction, Vaughn tugged his arm. “But we should probably give her some space. Are you hungry?”

“Not really.” It was the truth; Rhys’ stomach felt like it was home to a nest of spiderants. But at the mention of food the spiderants perked up a little, and so did Rhys. “Speaking of—where’s Yvette?”

Vaughn’s face didn’t so much fall as it slowly eroded, like a mountain cut away by a river. “Oh, Yvette went home. Few years ago now. Haggled her way onto some ship—you know how she was.” 

The spiderants in Rhys’ stomach evacuated, leaving behind a hollow void. 

“Oh,” he said. 

“It’s for the best,” Vaughn assured him, though Rhys didn’t feel particularly assured, or particularly anything, for that matter. “She really hated Pandora. She was never happy here.”

Too many plates were spinning in Rhys’ mind. He let the one labelled ‘Yvette’ crash, and focused on Vaughn instead. “Were you?”

Vaughn smiled. 

Rhys had always thought his poker face needed work.

Then Vaughn’s face lit up, genuine this time. “Hey, actually, I know something you might like! We’ve had some… problems… lately—just usual Pandora stuff, don’t worry about it—but we’ve been trying to improve our security—y’know, the big gate and everything? Our cybersecurity could use some work too. You’re good at all that stuff, right? I mean, of course you are, you’re like a quarter robot, so... ”

The ice crept up into Rhys’ throat and suddenly it was hard to breathe. 

“Uhhh sure,” said Rhys. “Yeah. Totally. That’s my thing. That I do.” If he sounded as strangled as he felt, Vaughn’s reaction didn’t show it. “But, y’know what, I’m actually pretty tired right now.” He stepped away from Vaughn towards the hall, gesturing over his shoulder in the direction of the spare rooms. “Mind if I…?”

Vaughn’s face filled with so much concern that Rhys felt a twinge of guilt. “Oh, shit, right, of course you are. Come on, there’s a room near Fiona’s.” 

The trip back to the guest rooms passed quickly with Rhys in preoccupied silence. His cybernetics were like a toothache he couldn’t ignore, poking at it with his tongue every twenty seconds just to make sure it still hurt. Once again, he tried and failed to connect to the EchoNet. _Error. Error. Error._ Over a decade of missing software updates. No wonder he couldn’t get it to work. 

He didn’t realize they’d arrived until Vaughn stopped and Rhys almost plowed into him.

“Here,” said Vaughn, nudging the door open to a sparse but decent room. “Fiona’s in the room on the left, so if someone starts banging on your wall in the wee hours of the morning, that’ll be her.” 

Rhys managed a feeble grin. “Sounds about right.” As he entered the room, he ran his defunct right hand through his hair. “Well, thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.” 

Vaughn hesitated for half a second, and then he lurched forward, hauling Rhys down into another tight hug. 

This time, at least, Rhys had the wherewithal to return the favor. He closed his eyes, tried to lose himself in the familiar touch—but Vaughn was bulkier than he remembered, and stronger, and his ponytail tickled the back of Rhys' hand—

“God, I really thought you were gone,” said Vaughn, muffled by Rhys’ jacket. “It’s so good to see you. You have no idea.”

Rhys didn’t. He felt hopelessly out of touch, like a thin film of cellophane separated him from the world. “Seems like you did pretty well for yourself.”

Vaughn shrugged. “I guess.” When he pulled away, his eyes were bright, which only made Rhys feel worse. “Just don’t disappear on me again.”

“I’ll do my best.” Rhys’ throat felt impossibly tight as he reached for the door. “See you tomorrow, Vaughn.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While some bridges burn, others get rebuilt.

Five minutes after laying down to sleep, Fiona surrendered to her restless energy and began carving a valley between her bed and side table. The pounding in her head served as a bassline.

In thirty years of hustling, Fiona had done her fair share of shitty jobs. She’d stolen from people who didn’t deserve it. Told lies that made her skin crawl. Sacrificed her dignity at the altar of petty cash. Gotten cozy with people she’d rather have fed to a bullymong. More often than she’d liked, the reward for finishing a job was less than the cost to complete it. It was a risk inherent to doing what she did, a tax on anyone stupid or unlucky enough to live on Pandora. 

This vault key debacle didn’t just take the cake, it took the whole goddamn bakery.

Vaults were supposed to be worth it. They were supposed to be the pot of gold at the end of the hideous Pandoran rainbow of danger and violence. They weren’t supposed to punt you into the future with nothing to show for it but an _I Found A Vault And All I Got Was This Lousy Time Travel_ t-shirt. 

All that work. All that risk, and struggle, and fear, and loss, and for _what?_

She kicked the side table in frustration. It toppled to the floor with a loud bang. A muffled yell of surprise came from the other side of the wall.

“Fiona?” came a voice, and she stepped closer to the wall to try and make it out. “You still awake?” 

Rhys. 

Of course. Who else?

“Obviously,” she called back. “Couldn’t sleep.” She cracked a grin to the empty room. “You think this counts as jetlag?” 

No reply.

What an asshole.

She made it another two laps of the room before there was a knock on her door. She answered it to find Rhys on the other side, looking as tired as Fiona felt.

“I couldn’t sleep either,” he told her with a thin smile.

It certainly looked like he’d tried. His jacket and waistcoat were gone, the shirt underneath rumpled and unbuttoned further than Fiona found strictly necessary. His hair was in a minor state of disarray, odd strands beginning to break free from the industrial-strength glue he’d imprisoned them in. His shoulders were slumped, and he seemed shorter somehow, diminished.

It did nothing to quell the unease that had settled into her bones since they touched that damn box.

“You look naked,” she told him. 

“Gee, thanks for not being weird about it.” He nodded to the pile of clothes in the corner of her room, her hat in pride of place atop her jacket, belts and accessories. “Could say the same to you.” He reached out and gave the collar of her vest a tug. “Huh. So this part is all one piece? My money was on a long-sleeved blouse.”

Fiona knocked his hand away. “Don’t speculate about my clothing, you creep.” The bedframe squeaked as she sat down heavily. “So how’d it go after I left? You braid his hair and cry or whatever?”

“Come on, don’t be a dick.” Rhys barely had the energy to sound irritated, which made her feel a little guilty. “He showed me around. It’s, um.” He swallowed and reached for his hair, mussing it up more as he tried to fix it. “Changed a lot.”

“No shit,” said Fiona.

“Yeah.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Vaughn’s done an amazing job with this place. It’s incredible.”

The pride in the words didn’t line up with his tone of voice. Fiona raised an eyebrow, but Rhys didn’t elaborate. He sank down beside her, and with his legs stretched out out, his feet almost touched the opposite wall. 

Rhys broke the silence first. “He wanted me to take a look at some code they’re working on. Cybersecurity. Thought it would make me feel better, I guess, but...” 

He sighed and shut his eyes. The metal hand curled to a fist in his lap. 

“Your tech’s still fucked up, then,” said Fiona.

“Yeah.” Rhys let his head thump back against the wall and stared at the ceiling. “All the software’s out of date. Can’t connect to the EchoNet.”

Fiona hummed in consideration. “So can you still see and everything?”

“Yeah, but—”

“No offense, but your inability to stream cat videos directly into your brain doesn’t really seem like a high-priority problem right now.” 

Rhys opened his mouth to argue and then thought better of it, slumping further down the wall. “Yeah.” Though he nodded, he was quiet and sounded unconvinced. “I guess you’re right.”

“I’m always right.” 

She rested her elbows on her knees, staring at her tipped-over end table without really seeing it. There was an invisible weight in the room, waiting for Fiona to pick it up—only she knew that once she did she’d never be able to set it down again.

“What about about you?” Rhys’ tacky boot knocked against hers. “Are you okay?” 

She shrugged. “Still got a headache.”

“That’s not really what I meant.”

“I know what you meant. It’s a stupid question. We passed ‘okay’ twelve years ago. ‘Okay’ isn’t even a blip on the horizon. ”

“Exactly,” said Rhys, “so I thought you might want to talk about what happened.” When Fiona didn’t respond, he added, “You know. With Sasha?” 

“She’ll get over it.” Fiona dismissed it with a wave. “She always does this: storms off to do whatever-it-is, then a few hours go by, she cools off and realizes she’s being dramatic. It’ll be fine.”

“Um…” Rhys rubbed the back of his neck, his voice pitched higher in conjunction with his wince. “Are you sure about that?”

Fiona rolled her eyes. “You got siblings, Rhys?” 

The question caught him off guard. “No.” 

“Sisters fight. It happens.”

Rhys made an uncomfortable noise halfway to a laugh. “I know that, but—”

“I’m telling you, she’ll realize she’s being ridiculous—”

“She’s being ridiculous?” Rhys sounded choked.

“Of course she is,” said Fiona, matter-of-fact. “She’s mad at me for things she knows I wouldn’t do.”

“Right, but I mean…” Still rubbing his neck, Rhys’ nose wrinkled in doubt. “You did do them, though. Technically.” 

Just like that, Fiona’s irritation flared up again. “Whose side are you on?” 

“I’m not on a side,” said Rhys, in a patient voice that made her jaw clench. 

“Rhys,” she ground out, a single-word warning.

Rhys did not look like a man who had any intention of heeding it. “Look, I get it.”

Fiona laughed despite herself. “Excuse me?” 

“I know how you feel.”

“How the hell would you know anything about how I feel?”

Cavalier and idiotic, Rhys blundered on. “I know you're deflecting because it feels like—like if you face it, the guilt will suffocate you, but—”

“Guilt?” Fiona repeated. “I haven’t… okay, I don’t know what you’re talking about, but you _really_ need to shut up.” 

“Fine.” Rhys sounded like he was speaking to a toddler. “Forgive me for thinking you might want to talk to a friend who knows what it’s like to have a secret blow up in your face and hurt the people you—”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Fiona turned on him, eyes narrowed dangerously. “My secret was some extra cash. _Your_ secret took over a space station and almost got us all killed.” She jabbed a finger in his face for emphasis, and Rhys leaned backwards. “We are not comparable here. What I did is nothing like what you did. Those two things are so different, they can’t even be quantified with the same unit of measurement. All right?”

“Okay, okay, point taken! Sheesh.” Palms raised in surrender, Rhys rolled his eyes. “I was just trying to empathize.”

“Don’t. It’s embarrassing for you.”

Rhys made an indignant noise in the back of his throat and folded his arms, his bottom lip jutting out in a ridiculous pout. “I’m trying to help you!”

“Well, save it. I don’t need life advice from the guy who let a psychopath ride shotgun in his brain.” She considered it for a second, one finger on her chin like she’d hit an epiphany. “It’s probably a good thing your tech stopped working before you could download another dictator.” 

It was a low blow. Fiona knew it landed from the way he flinched.

“This isn’t my fault,” he said. He didn’t sound sure of it.

Some part of Fiona knew he was right. Rhys was a mere bystander, buffeted by the same winds of misfortune as she was.

But her head was throbbing, and she was tired. The nine million dollars in her inventory felt like a curse and she was twelve years out of the loop. Rhys had been welcomed back with a hug, and Fiona’s baby sister had been replaced by a bitter stranger. 

Sinking her claws into something had been too tempting to resist. Now that she’d drawn blood, it was too satisfying to let go. 

“No? You are the one who started running for the vault.” Fiona smirked. “Come to think of it, every time you show up, my life goes to shit. You’re like a bad piece of fruit. Your poor judgment spills over and contaminates everything around it.”

“Poor judgment?” Rhys’ laugh was high-pitched and mirthless. “Wanna talk poor judgment? I was the only one back there who didn’t believe you were selfish enough to keep nine million dollars for yourself.” His expression turned to a genuine scowl, his shoulders squared and eyes narrowed. In the shadows of her dark room, the lines of his cheekbones seemed sharper. “You can blame a lot of things on me, but your unique gift for driving people away? That’s all you, Fiona. The only surprising thing in all of this is that you managed to go this long before you fucked it up with Sasha too.” 

The anger simmering inside her boiled over. She stood up, towering over him. “Get the hell out of my room.”

Rhys leapt up too. “Gladly!” In two long strides he was at her door, pulling it open so roughly the hinges creaked. “It’s not like I _enjoy_ being your punching bag.” 

Fiona was right behind him, drawn up as tall as she could make herself, her lip curled dangerously. “Yet here you stand, in punching distance.” 

“God, it is impossible to be your friend!”

Fiona wrenched control of the door away from him as he stepped into the hall. “Then take the fucking hint and stop trying!” 

Rhys flipped her off without a backwards glance. Fiona slammed the door shut.

* * *

With a flashlight held between her teeth and a wrench in one hand, Sasha rolled herself underneath the caravan and started running through her list. 

The brake calipers would do for now, but they were on their way out. The rear struts were on their last legs. The windshield existed in a state of perpetual fog. The air conditioner was unreliable. The electronics were perpetually on the fritz. The underside of the caravan may as well have been called the Rust Commons. 

Cataloguing it all felt like a losing game. For every repair Sasha cobbled together, two or three more cropped up. 

Replacing the steering stack was more difficult than Sasha anticipated. The part itself had been in worse shape than she’d hoped, and the installation wasn’t her best work, sloppy and hurried and jeopardized by traitorous thoughts that kept wandering away from the task at hand. She could practically hear Janey’s voice lecturing her to focus on what she was doing, to not get lost in her own head—  
_  
You let your emotions run away with you, you always have—_

Her hand slipped. The wrench jumped off the bolt she was tightening and hit her in the forehead, and Sasha swore. 

That was enough maintenance, she decided. There wasn’t much more she could do to the caravan right now, and she wasn’t about to waste any more time at Helios. She had a real life to focus on. A life she’d painstakingly carved for herself over twelve long years. A life she wasn’t about to let be derailed by any vault or secret fortune or magical time travel again—

She rolled out from under the caravan and crashed into the legs of someone standing beside it.

“Ow!” Two metal-cuffed ankles limped out of her way. 

“Rhys?” she said in surprise, garbled around the flashlight between her teeth.

He flinched and shielded his eyes as the light shone straight in his face. “Uh, h-hi.” 

When Sasha took the flashlight out of her mouth and switched it off, he lowered his hand and put on a nervous smile. He looked even taller than she remembered from her ground-level vantage point.

Sasha stared at him. “How long have you been standing there?” 

“Just a couple minutes,” he said, still fidgety and nervous. Off her look, he added quickly, “I didn’t want to say hello and scare you.”

Sasha raised an eyebrow. “Scare me,” she repeated. 

“Yeah…” Rhys turned bright red and rubbed the back of his neck. “You know how in movies when someone’s under a car, and someone else says something, and the person under the car sits up and hits their head? I didn’t... want you to... do that.”

Sasha shoved herself to her feet. “I don’t scare very easy,” she said flatly. 

“Well, there was that time at the garage with… um…” His expression changed mid-sentence, like he’d only just heard the words coming out of his own mouth. “Actually, you probably don’t remember. Which is probably good. Never mind.” 

“What are you talking about?” 

“Oh, just, um, it was a while ago— _really_ a while ago, I guess—” He rubbed his neck more insistently. “We were all getting ready at Scooter’s, and you were picking out a Hyperion outfit, and… um…” 

Amazingly, he managed to look even more sheepish than he already did, the blood draining from his face.

“Oh.” The metaphorical light bulb over Sasha’s head switched on. “You mean when you shoved a dead guy’s face at me.” 

“Yeaaah…” Rhys squeezed his eyes shut as he winced. “Wow, I definitely did not need to bring _that_ up.” 

“Nope. But you did. And here I’d forgotten all about it.” 

Rhys let out a pitiful groan. “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I did it. Or why I brought it up again now.” 

“Well…” The corner of her lip twitched. “I thought it was pretty funny.”

Rhys opened his eyes, surprised but hopeful. “Really?”

“Oh, not what you did. That was disgusting,” she clarified. “Just the fact that you thought it would be a good thing to do at all.”

The little spark of hope extinguished immediately. “Oh.” 

He cleared his throat and straightened his shoulders, a transparent attempt to regain some dignity. It had the opposite effect, instead focusing Sasha’s attention on how much worse for wear he looked than when she’d last seen him in Vaughn’s office with a dumbstruck expression on his face. He’d ditched his jacket, and his waistcoat was done up topsy-turvy, the second button laced through the wrong hole. He was both obviously anxious, and obviously trying to seem like he wasn’t. 

The comforting blanket of shock must be getting threadbare. 

Sasha wiped her hands on the rag tucked into the waistband of her pants. “So…?” 

“So!” His eyes darted around for a topic of conversation and landed on her caravan. “Nice ride you’ve got.” 

She snorted. “No, it’s not.” 

“Nah, sure it is, it’s… homey.” He gave the hood an affectionate pat, something inside clanked, and he yanked his hand away. “Vaughn, ah, said you were fixing it up.” His voice, like his smile, was strained and not particularly convincing. 

Sasha shrugged. “It gets me from A to B. Most of the time.” She tossed the dirty rag into the open toolbox at her feet. “And I’m not any richer than I was last time you saw me, so…” 

For a split second she thought of Fiona, sitting somewhere in this godforsaken compound with the biggest wad of cash Sasha’d ever seen. With the toe of her shoe, Sasha slammed the lid of the toolbox shut.

“Are you leaving?” he asked, and when Sasha’s head snapped up to look at him he blanched. “I-I know you said you were, but Fiona thought—”

“What would Fiona know about it?” Sasha demanded. “She doesn’t know anything about my life.” Rhys shrank back as Sasha stood taller. “I told you, I’ve got to go meet a client. I didn’t just pause everything for twelve years in case the two of you decided to drop out of the sky—”

“I know!” said Rhys quickly. “I didn’t say you would. Or that you should've.”

Sasha only realized she was leaning forward from the way he was leaning back; embarrassed, she stepped back and relaxed her shoulders. “Sorry. It’s… been a weird day.”

“No kidding.” Rhys’ smile was small but sincere, and it faded quickly, replaced again by worry. “Actually, I came here because I was… kinda hoping…” 

Jaw set, Sasha braced herself for what was sure to come: some sad plea for her to stay, to reconsider, to spend her time mending bridges Fiona had burnt years ago. It wasn’t fair. Fiona wasn’t the one who’d had to salvage a life from the wreckage—

“...you’d take me with you,” Rhys finished.

Sasha’s eyebrows shot up on her forehead. “What?”

“I could help you,” he said quickly. “Maybe. I mean, I don’t really know what you do. But—”

“No.” As the initial shock passed and Sasha recalibrated, her arms folded of their own accord and she started to shake her head. “I prefer to work alone.” 

“Yeah, I thought you might say that,” Rhys admitted, discouraged but not yet defeated. “I’ll stay out of your way, I promise. I don’t need a cut of the profit. I could split the driving, or cook, or…”

“I don’t get it.” There was something strange about the offer, a desperation peeking around the corner that didn’t make sense. “Why would you want to do that?” 

Rhys shrugged as though what he was suggesting wasn’t totally absurd. “Well, I just thought—”

But Sasha frowned, her eyes narrowing as she studied him closer. “Don’t lie to me.” 

Rhys’ false confidence wavered. He hesitated, and then he said, “Because I don’t have anywhere else to go and I can’t stand it here.”

No matter that she’d asked for it, the honesty surprised her. When she said nothing, the words tumbled out of Rhys like a secret.

“Don’t get me wrong, this place is incredible. What Vaughn’s done with it is… is…” Shrugging hopelessly, he gestured to the rest of the wide room, his eyes darting around anxiously. “But I hate it. It was weird before, but it’s worse now. Everything’s so different. It all got… built back up, and that's good, I know that’s good, but I feel so—so—separate from all of it, and everyone here looks at me like I’m—like I’m _him_.” 

“You mean Vaughn?” asked Sasha, confused.

“No,” said Rhys darkly. “I don’t mean Vaughn.” The bitterness was gone as quick as it’d come, replaced by remorse and fear. “This place is a monument made of all my worst mistakes.” 

He scrubbed his face with both hands and let out a long, shaky breath. Uncomfortable and unsure what to do, Sasha kept quiet, hugged her arms around herself and waited for him to finish.

Rhys took a few more steadying breaths before he let his hands fall away. He slumped backwards, resting against the side of her caravan. 

“Sorry,” he said eventually, a little hoarse. “I didn’t mean to dump all that on you. None of this is your problem to fix.” For the first time, Sasha noticed the dark circles blooming under his eyes. “And I know at this point I’m just… some guy you knew for a little while a long time ago.” He smile was filled with regret. “But for me…” The smile faded. What it left behind was shy and sad. “I still think of you as one of my best friends.”

A long-forgotten something wedged itself in Sasha’s throat and stayed put even when she swallowed to dislodge it. She looked away, squinting across the garage and mirroring his pose, her back against the caravan door.

“This place makes my skin crawl too,” she said, once she trusted her voice to stay steady. She glanced sidelong at him. “You talk to Vaughn about this?” 

“No.” His shoulders drooped. “I… couldn’t. Not yet. He’s been through a lot, I…” 

It was a flimsy excuse, one Sasha recognized from her well-worn library of excuses. 

But it wasn’t her place to pry. 

“Hmm,” was all she said. She worried her lip, chipped a broken bit of polish off her thumbnail. Ran her fingers through her long braided hair. Then lifted her chin and tried to sound casual. “I guess it’ll be nice to have someone to split the driving with.”

“Really?” Rhys’ head whipped around to look at her, stunned. “I can come?”

Sasha shrugged. 

“Sure, why not?” A chorus of why-nots echoed in her mind immediately, but for once she ignored them. She pointed an authoritative finger at his chest. “One rule. We are not talking about Fiona. Okay? I don’t want to hear it.”

Rhys nodded, smothering the flicker of guilt on his face quick enough that Sasha thought she might have imagined it. “Works for me.”

“Cool.” She fished her keys from her pocket and tossed them towards him; they clinked against his chrome hand as he fumbled the catch. “Start the engine and take the toolbox inside. I’ll go tell them they better open that damn door.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again to @nowrunalong for the beta! Also, check out this [sweet drawing of older Vaughn](http://nokikissa.tumblr.com/post/182539186851) by @Nokikissa :D


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rhys and Sasha start their road trip, leaving Fiona and Vaughn to their own devices.
> 
> or: Everyone runs from their feelings, some more literally than others.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally had enough of a sense of everything to properly count out approximate chapters. I think realistically we're looking at 10. Adjusted the counter accordingly. I've said that three times, but for real this time! Probably! Gonna aim for 10!

Once exhaustion claimed Fiona, she surrendered completely. By the time the frantic knocking on her door woke her up, the left side of her body ached from being in one position too long.

Her headache was better. Her mood was not. 

“Ugh, will you relax?” she called. “I’m up, I’m up.” Groggy, she swung her legs to the floor and reached for her discarded clothes. “Didn’t know there was a damn roll call.”

To her surprise, the voice on the other side of the door was Vaughn’s. “Oh. Good,” it said. “You’re still there. Thank God.”

“Uh… yep.” She frowned as she pulled on one of her boots. “Where else would I be?” 

Vaughn didn’t answer.

His silence had a way of feeling urgent, so Fiona dressed as quickly as possible for someone who wore quite as many belts as she did. She brushed her fingers through her hair, cringing at the dirty texture before she hid it away underneath her hat. Hopefully, at some point in the last twelve years, Vaughn and his weird commune had invested in hot water. 

“Hey,” she said, redundant, as she opened the door. “Where’s the fire? I miss the continental breakfast or something?” 

Vaughn didn’t crack a smile. With the fresh eyes of a new day, Fiona noticed the changes she’d been too preoccupied to pay attention to before. It wasn’t just age, although the wear and tear of a life lived on Pandora had left its marks. There was something else too, sitting heavy on his shoulders, so comfortable there Vaughn had probably stopped noticing it.

Fiona knew the feeling.

“Rhys is missing,” said Vaughn, and Fiona’s train of thought jumped the tracks.

“What?” She shook her head to clear away the last of the morning fuzz. “I just talked to him.” 

Talked, yelled at. Same difference. 

“When? Where did he go?” 

“Few hours ago.” Fiona stepped past him into the hall, looking up and down like she might spot Rhys hiding behind a corner. “And I dunno, I assumed he went back to his room.”

“He’s not there.” Vaughn nudged open the door to demonstrate.

Hands on her hips, Fiona surveyed Rhys’ empty room like a crime scene. It was identical to Fiona’s except for the black jacket folded neatly over the end table. The bedsheets were rumpled like they’d been vacated in a hurry. 

“I was checking in,” Vaughn explained, a note of panic rising in his voice. “It had been a while, I thought he might be hungry, but he wasn’t answering the door, and—”

“Relax, will you?” Fiona lifted a hand before he got ahead of himself. “He didn’t vanish into thin air.” 

Vaughn glared at her.

“I mean, I’m sure he’s around here somewhere,” she amended hastily. “Probably sulking.” 

“Sulking? Why would he be…” Vaughn’s eyes narrowed. “Hold on. When you say you two ‘talked’, do you mean in a civil, polite manner?”

Fiona adopted her most innocent expression. “Well…”

“Seriously?” Vaughn pinched the bridge of his nose and groaned. “Where do you two find the _energy_?”

“Rhys and I bicker sometimes,” Fiona assured him. “It’s our thing.”

Vaughn’s arms stayed folded, his mouth an unamused line; clearly, he didn’t fully appreciate this for the delightful quirk it was. “What did you say to each other?” 

The question triggered an instant mental replay of her conversation with Rhys, and Fiona felt a tiny prickle of discomfort. It was possible things had gotten a little more heated than usual. Under the strangeness of circumstance, blows had landed with more force. 

But that was just how they communicated. Rhys knew that. Rhys had always understood that.

Besides, if it was anyone’s fault, _he_ was the one being a nosy jackass. 

“Don’t worry about it,” she insisted, to calm her pesky malnourished conscience as much as Vaughn. “He’s probably busy crowd-surfing or getting carried around on a sedan chair.” 

Vaughn didn’t laugh. Increasingly, Fiona felt her sense of humour was going unappreciated. 

“I tried to call him.” Despite all her reassurances, there was still that frantic edge to Vaughn’s voice. “But I don’t think it’s going through. That’s weird. He’s never offline. I mean, not really. It’s wired into him—that’s the point—”

Recalling all Rhys’ complaints about his eye—and all her own threats to rip out it—Fiona winced. 

“Yeah, that’s not gonna work,” she muttered. “This place is full of people, right? Let’s just ask around.”

Asking around proved to be an exercise in anger management.

No one they met had any intel to offer. Instead, they had a number of follow-up questions, each more aggravating to Fiona than the last. Rhys, as in _the_ Rhys? Was it true, was he back? Had he returned to deal with the raiders? Did he look the same as the drawings? 

Could his cybernetic arm actually shoot lasers? 

Was it true he was secretly a siren?

Had he really killed a zombie Handsome Jack with his bare hands inside the vault?

“It’s incredible you haven’t murdered every single one of these people,” Fiona growled, dragging Vaughn away from the latest useless idiot. “Your patience must be unparalleled.”

In the moment, Vaughn didn’t look much of anything besides increasingly anxious. 

If Fiona were a more nervous person, she imagined it’d be rubbing off on her. Thankfully, she kept focused on the facts: Whatever had happened in the vault was a one-off thing. There were no more magic boxes lying around to stumble upon. She wasn’t going to get catapulted into the distant future while brushing her teeth. 

When they inevitably found Rhys eating a breakfast burrito somewhere in the cafeteria, Fiona was going to kick his ass.

“Haven’t seen Rhys, have you?” she asked the dozenth passerby. The words had begun to lose meaning. Before they were even out of her mouth, Fiona was already imagining the inane reply she’d get. Something stupid about—

“Uh, I did last night, yeah,” said the woman, and Fiona’s brain fizzled. The woman turned to Vaughn. “He was talking to your scary friend.”

“Scary friend?” Fiona asked.

“Sasha,” said Vaughn immediately. 

“ _Scary_ friend?” Fiona repeated.

Vaughn didn’t think anything of it. Maybe he didn’t hear her at all; he was wholly focused on the other woman. “Where were they? In the garage?”

The woman nodded. “Yeah. Looked like they were getting ready to leave.”

“What?” Fiona hadn’t expected that. “ _Leave?_ ” She turned from the woman to Vaughn and began to shake her head. “There’s no way—”

Preoccupied with Rhys’ absence, Vaughn ignored her. “Thanks,” he told the woman.

Then he was off down the hallway so quickly Fiona had to jog a step to catch up.

“Garage is too far,” said Vaughn, answering a question she hadn’t asked. “This’ll be quicker.” 

He led her into the office from yesterday. For a moment, Fiona’s eyes were drawn to the corner where Sasha had stood, cold and silent until she wasn’t, a stranger in familiar skin. 

Fiona turned her back to that side of the room as Vaughn rummaged through his desk.

“There’s no way Sasha left,” Fiona reiterated, since it’d gone unnoticed the first time. “Storming off to pout, sure, that’s very Sasha. But she wouldn’t just go. Not after…” She cut the thought off in its tracks. “Besides, there’s no way she’d take Rhys with her. When Sasha gets moody like this she barely talks to anyone.” Vaughn looked up at that, but kept quiet, and Fiona offered a grin. “Believe me, I lived through her teen years.”

Despite it all, the memory lit an ember of affection somewhere in Fiona’s heart. Slammed doors and temper tantrums, pouts and dramatic declarations: Sasha had run the gamut in her youth. Felix once said that while Fiona was a riptide, Sasha was a rapid.

Fiona’s grin disappeared, the ember extinguished with a cold douse of water. That volatility was precisely why she’d waited to bring up Felix and the money, and now—

 _Thunk._ Vaughn slammed an old echo comm on the desk between them.

* * *

Rhys often had trouble sleeping.

Up on Helios, before, insomnia had never been a issue—whatever that said about his moral compass. But his first night on Pandora, fear had kept him awake, and then it’d been a never-ending adrenaline rush, a week-long sleepover full of too much laughing and chatting and bickering to ever settle down. 

Atlas was better at first, if only because of the medication he’d downed to keep pain and infection at bay. As he recovered, the drugged daze gave way to long strings of restless nights and nightmares that left him feeling hollow when he woke. 

So the speed at which he nodded off in Sasha’s caravan—in a hammock, no less—was a testament to his exhaustion. Swaddled like an oversized caterpillar, he rode out the wobble and bounce of the caravan’s shoddy suspension and dreamed, as he often did, of running though Helios.

The corridors were endless and labyrinthine, and his legs weren’t working properly. Fiona and the others long gone, leaving him to his own mistakes. He needed to find an escape pod. Why had he believed they would wait for him, anyway? When would he take the fucking hint? 

Vaughn’s voice echoed after him like a spectre, wondering where he’d been, wondering why he’d left, asking for—

“Sasha?” Vaughn sounded strange, static-y and distant. “You there?” 

Rhys’ eyes snapped open. For a fraction of a second, he hung there in total confusion, blinking at the caravan ceiling. 

“Hey, Vaughn.” Up at the driver’s seat, only a few feet away, Sasha’s voice was clear as a bell. “What’s up?”

Rhys lifted his head to peer around the side of the hammock. So he _could_ hear Vaughn’s voice, projected through the speakers on the caravan’s dashboard. Well. At least that was reassuring. 

Fiona’s voice crackled over the line before Vaughn could reply. “Where are you?” 

“On the road.” All the warmth bled out of Sasha’s tone, leaving behind something clipped and hard. “Like I said I would be.”

“You actually _left_ , are you kidding me?” The heat of Fiona’s anger was palpable even through the Echo; Rhys cringed, still nursing the burns from the night before. “After all those theatrics yesterday, you just—”

Vaughn cut her off. “Sasha, have you seen Rhys?”

In stark contrast to Fiona, Vaughn didn’t sound angry. Instead, Rhys recognized barely concealed panic.

Guilt pooled in his stomach, sudden and sickening. 

“Yeah,” Sasha answered. “He’s with me.” 

“ _What?_ ” came Fiona and Vaughn’s voices in tandem.

Rhys burrowed as deep into the hammock as he could, hiding from two people who couldn’t see him anyway. 

“I told the person at the door.” Sasha sounded matter-of-fact. “I figured the whole place would know in about ten minutes.”

Silence from the other end of the line. Rhys shut his eyes, rifling through his mental rolodex of Vaughn facial expressions to try and picture the most appropriate one. Angry? Upset? Sad? 

Betrayed?

Getting no other response, Sasha kept her voice casual. “You wanna talk to him? He’s sleeping—”

In a momentary panic, Rhys snapped his eyes shut and did his best to look peaceful and asleep.

“—but I can wake him up if you want.”

Rhys waited in suspense, left hand curled to a fist at his side. He didn’t want to talk to Vaughn. That was the whole problem. If he knew what to say to Vaughn, maybe he wouldn’t be lying in a hammock in Sasha’s—

“No,” said Vaughn. “I don’t.”

The answer Rhys had been hoping for—but he felt it like a punch in the gut. 

“I’ll keep an eye on him,” said Sasha, with the slightest hint of guilt. “Babysit. Bring him back without a scratch.” 

A derisive noise came from the Echo. Rhys guessed it was Fiona. 

“You guys do whatever you want,” said Vaughn. “I don’t care.” 

To an inexperienced audience, Vaughn would have sounded calm, measured. 

Rhys knew better. His stomach twisted over itself in the cold grip of guilt.

“I’ll talk to you later,” said Sasha.

Vaughn and Fiona hung up without another word.

Rhys stayed where he was for some time after that, jaw clenched against a persistent nausea that was exacerbated by the hammock swaying as Sasha drove. Rhys had known that Vaughn wouldn’t exactly be thrilled by his decision to abscond into the night without warning. Of course he’d known. 

But knowing something and witnessing it were two different things. 

He couldn’t pinpoint the last time Vaughn had been truly angry with him. Back with Hyperion, certainly—but when? Over what? Unlike Sasha or Fiona, Vaughn kept things bottled tight. Rhys might not have even noticed. 

The possibility made him feel even worse.

Still, did it really matter? Vaughn would be fine. Better than fine, if their previous separations were anything to go by. He’d built an entire community from the rubble of things Rhys had destroyed. Maybe this time he’d solve world hunger. He didn’t need Rhys lurking around, contaminating everything with his poor judgment.

Once enough time had passed—and his stomach had calmed down—Rhys swung his legs over the side of the hammock. Right as he tried to stand, Sasha hit a pothole, and he tumbled forward, landing face-first on the floor with a muffled curse word and a thud.

Up at the front, Sasha laughed at his misfortune. “All right back there?”

Recalling a college girlfriend who spent a lot of time talking about “karma”, he groaned again. 

“Yep.” Peeling himself off the floor, Rhys rubbed his sore forehead. “Peachy.”

Sasha spared him a quick glance over her shoulder. The sun was peeking over the horizon, the colourful morning light silhouetting her as it trickled through the windshield. Suddenly very aware of his own state of dishevelment, Rhys tried to tame his hair and flatten out his rumpled shirt at the same time. 

“I’ve never slept in that thing while the caravan was moving before,” she said, oblivious to Rhys’ malfunctioning heart as she turned back to the road. “How was it?”

“Oh, uh.” Rhys cleared his throat, approaching the driver’s seat with caution. “Kind of nauseating! But, you know.” He shrugged, doing his best to sound like a cool, seasoned Pandoran who didn’t need creature comforts like pillows or lumbar support. “I’ve spent most of the last week sleeping on rocks in the desert, so…”

“A real bed takes up too much space,” she said, an answer to a question he hadn’t asked. “Just seemed easier this way.”

Rhys surveyed the caravan as she said it, frowning. “...Right.” 

Her new caravan was roughly the same size as the older one, if not smaller, but having only two occupants gave it the illusion of being much larger. Everything inside was designed for one: the tiny kitchenette, the hammock strung from the ceiling, the small table and its single chair, the slim mirror fixed to the wall over a tiny cabinet. He doubted if she’d even have enough cutlery for them to eat at the same time.

Perhaps it was simply economical. Minimalist. Or perhaps the caravan was unwelcoming by design, like Sasha had hung a _no vacancy_ sign on the door to her life. 

How had he managed to sneak past the velvet ropes? And how long he did he have before he got caught by the bouncer and evicted?

“You live in here all the time, I guess?” he asked, though he already knew the answer.

“Yep. Home sweet home on scenic Pandora.” She looked sidelong at him. “I like being on the road. Spent enough time in fucking Hollow Point for ten lifetimes.” 

Looking out into the desolate wasteland around them, Rhys found it hard to see the appeal. Hollow Point, at least, had something like civilization. People.

But only an idiot could miss the tired edge to her voice. Remembering her temper and his own perilous position one step above stowaway, Rhys held his tongue. 

Bent to fit, he perched himself against the wall near the driver’s seat, watching the landscape roll by. If he focused on the road, on the rumble and shake of the caravan, it was easy to imagine everything exactly the way it once was: Fiona telling Athena tall tales while she flicked cards at Vaughn, Gortys rolling around shouting conflicting directions, Loaderbot thumping around on the roof like an enormous Santa Claus. 

Sasha was staring determinedly at the road ahead, her knuckles tight on the steering wheel. Was she thinking the same thing? Or was that all too long ago to be anything but an aberration in her memory?

“Vaughn called, by the way,” she said, catching him off guard. “You didn’t tell him you were leaving.”

Rhys feigned interest in the windshield and rubbed his neck. “Well, it was… spur of the moment.”

“He sounded pissed.”

“I’ll call him back later,” said Rhys, browbeating his recently rehabilitated conscience back into submission. Eager for a change in subject, he nodded toward Sasha. “So... about this job we’re going to. What kind of work are you doing these days?”

Sasha didn’t look away from the road. She bit her bottom lip, shifted in her seat and draped one wrist over the top of the steering wheel.

“Worked with Janey for a few years. Learned a lot.” She patted the dashboard with her hand. “Helps me keep this thing running.” She slumped further down in the driver’s seat, a nonchalant pose he didn’t quite believe. “But it wasn’t for me. I was sick of Hollow Point, and Janey…” She grimaced. “Janey can be a lot.”

Rhys struggled to picture Janey’s sunny disposition alongside this new, older Sasha. 

“Yeah, I can see that,” he admitted. “So now…?” 

“Now I do a bit of everything.” She shrugged. “Whatever someone’ll pay me for. There’s always someone on Pandora with an odd job.”

Even with his comparatively limited experience, Rhys could appreciate the truth in that. He grinned. “Like a Vault Hunter, then.”

“No.” The steering wheel creaked as she tightened her grip. “Not like a Vault Hunter.” She looked at him seriously. “No vaults. Anyone stupid enough to get involved in that disaster can do it themselves.” 

“R-right.” Rhys felt like he’d worn steel-toed boots to walk through eggshells. “Sorry.”

Sasha rolled her shoulders, relaxed her grip on the wheel and let out a long breath. Then she said, “I don’t do assassinations either,” like she’d simply been listing professional limitations, not guarding a sore spot. “Too messy. I don’t want to get dragged into someone else’s drama.”

“Sensible,” Rhys agreed. “Although I gotta say, no vaults, no murder… feel like that’s gonna cut into your market around here.” 

To his great relief, Sasha grinned too, small but undeniable. “You have no idea.” 

As she raked her hand through her hair, Rhys noticed that she still painted her nails. He clung to the familiarity like a liferaft. 

“Luckily there’s always someone looking for a fetch-and-carry,” she continued, smirking. “I’m a courier with danger pay.”

She spoke casually, her posture still relaxed and at-home, but the look around her eyes betrayed her dissatisfaction. Alone in her one-person caravan for the better part of twelve years, taking odd jobs just to scrape by, believing the worst of the person she’d trusted most. 

A profoundly lonely existence, as far as Rhys could see. 

The thought he might bear some responsibility for it made him itch. Every hour that passed, the consequences of the Vault of the Traveler lay heavier and heavier. How long until he was buried alive?

Sasha broke the silence first. “If you’re bored, take a look at my radio.” She jerked her thumb towards a device sitting her dashboard. “It’s been acting up for weeks. Drives are a lot longer without any music.” She hooked her arm over the back of her chair. “I’m shit with electronics, but you can probably fix it with a wave of your hand. Literally.”

“Oh, I, um…” Familiar panic crept up his throat. “My cybernetics aren’t working. Software’s out of date and I can’t connect to update it. Even if I could…” He studied his right hand as he flexed his fingers. “Firmware’s old, too. Might just make things worse.”

Feeling Sasha’s eyes on him, he braced for the inevitable dismissal. It was a petty thing to complain about, all things considered. There were much bigger fish to fry. Should’ve thought of _that_ before cutting your arm off and going time travelling. 

“Can't you fix it?” she asked instead, and Rhys looked up in surprise. “I mean, there’s gotta be something. Right?”

“I could replace all of it,” Rhys answered. “Again.” He laughed nervously, letting his metal hand drop and running his left hand through his hair. “But I was, uh, kinda hoping I wouldn’t have to do that for a while.” 

It wouldn’t have to be like last time, he told himself. He could do it properly, plan for it. There had to be someone on the planet with an approximate knowledge of medical skills. Hell, after twelve years, procedures might have improved.

The mere thought still made his blood pressure spike.

“Hmmm,” said Sasha, mulling it over and pulling him out of his thoughts. “Guess it’s not like getting a haircut.”

“Not exactly.” He smiled. “I like yours, by the way. Haircut, I mean. It’s cool.” 

Sasha raised an eyebrow. Rhys’ cheeks flushed.

“N-not that the other one wasn’t cool,” he added quickly. “It was. I just meant, um—I like the shaved side. And the other side. They’re both good. Uh.”

“Thanks,” said Sasha, putting him out of his misery. She tossed her braids over her shoulder, and for the first time Rhys caught a glimpse of a long scar on her neck, half-hidden beneath her handkerchief. “Well, if you don’t wanna look at the radio, take the wheel for a bit. I could use a break.”

She stood up without waiting for an answer or parking the caravan; Rhys scrambled to take control in her place. 

“Where am I going?”

“Just keep driving south.” She stretched behind him, her spine cracking like popcorn. “You see any giant cliffs, man-eating creatures or angry bandits, try to avoid them.”

Rhys rolled his eyes. “Good advice.”

Her footsteps walked away, but paused half-way. “And if you wanna use the Echo, feel free.”

“Yeah.” He tried to make himself comfortable in the driver’s seat. With the Echo to the left of him and Sasha’s broken radio on the right, he focused his eyes on the road straight ahead. “Thanks.”

* * *

Fiona had never seen Vaughn angry before.

Amongst the other pennies dropping, that realization was an odd one. He clicked off the Echo while Sasha was mid-sentence, his thousand-yard stare fixed on nothing in particular. Though he didn’t look at her or say anything, Fiona could see his jaw muscles working as he chewed on unspoken words and a fury Fiona knew well.

The immaturity. The nerve. The absolute _cowardice_ — 

“Okay, fuck that,” said Fiona, sweeping it all under the rug with an industrial-size broom. “First, I want a shower, and then _please_ tell me you have somewhere I can shoot something.”

To her relief, Vaughn had given her a look of pure understanding and said, “Absolutely.”

That was how Fiona found herself riding shotgun in a bandit technical, with her hat in her lap, a rifle propped beside her and the wind drying out her damp hair. 

The Children of Helios avoided guns, Vaughn told her—a policy that in practice seemed to mean Vaughn had all of them. It was safer that way. They tried to avoid conflict. Twelve years out, shaking off the Hyperion name and reputation was still a work in progress. Approaching situations muzzle first wouldn’t help. 

“Sasha had a sniper rifle aimed at Rhys’ head,” Fiona pointed out. 

“Sasha’s not exactly receptive to our rules,” said Vaughn diplomatically. 

“Shocking,” Fiona muttered. But the whole point of this exercise was to stop thinking about her asshole sister and her idiot stowaway, so Fiona nudged him in the ribs. “So instead you stockpile your guns to go shoot the defenseless Pandoran wildlife?” 

“Defenseless?” he spluttered. “I don’t think anything on this planet is defenseless. And it’s not senseless carnage, I mean, we can always use fresh meat, and—”

Fiona laughed. “Chill, I’m just messing with you. Shooting stuff is the traditional method of letting off steam here on Pandora. You’ve just gone native.” She kicked her feet up. “Matter of fact, you must be out here all the time. How many adult babies are you in charge of, anyway?”

“Oh, God.” Vaughn pulled a face. “Please don’t call them that. I’ve been on the EchoNet.” 

Fiona laughed again at his disgust.

“And… I’m not sure,” he continued, a little shyer this time. “It… fluctuates.”

As a professional in the field, Fiona took great pride in being able to spot a lie.

“Seriously?” She narrowed her eyes. “Aren’t you a numbers guy? Figured you’d’ve set up some kind of registration or something. Give people those creepy papers with, like, your photo and your birthday and stuff on it.”

Vaughn looked between her and the road repeatedly. “You mean ID? Are you trying to describe ID?” But he shook his head. “No. We’re not Helios. That’s the point.”

Fiona snorted. “Then you might wanna consider rebranding.” 

He didn’t answer, leaving Fiona to wonder if she’d touched a nerve. Wary of making any more enemies in such a short timeframe, she let it drop, scanning the horizon instead for any sign of prey. 

“Hey, I see some movement that way,” she said, pointing to a rock outcropping in the distance. “Might be some rakks.”

Vaughn frowned as he followed her finger. “That’s south,” he said.

Fiona stared at him. “So? What’s wrong with south?” 

Vaughn’s frown deepened. “Nothing, but…”

“But? We’ve been out here twenty minutes and we haven’t seen anything.” She patted the barrel of her gun. “C’mon, I wanna shoot something. I have a _lot_ of stress to relieve.”

Vaughn gave in with a sigh. With a turn of the wheel, they were off in the direction of Fiona’s sighting. 

It was only a few minutes of driving to catch up to what Fiona had seen: a flock of rakks, spread out across the rocky terrain. Vaughn cut the engine early to avoid alerting the prey, they each grabbed their guns, and then the hunt was on.

The two of them worked independently, an unspoken agreement Fiona was grateful for. Firing at the rakks, trying to land hits that were efficient, shots that wouldn’t spoil the meat—it was a task that required her full attention, a run on instinct and reflex with no time for anything else. At least rakks hadn’t changed much in twelve years.

God, it was refreshing.

She took out three before she lowered her gun, catching a breath to watch Vaughn get off a shot of his own. She was impressed by the sight: steady aim, a clean shot, no hesitancy even as the rakk dive-bombed. 

Huh.

“You’re a pretty good shot,” she told him, dragging one of her kills back to the technical. “You really have gone native.”

Vaughn shrugged as he heaved up one of his rakks, too. “Well, I had a good teacher.” 

Fiona’s expression soured. It was easy to guess who he meant.

Still, she ignored it and went to fetch her next kill, sprawled in the dust a few feet in front of the vehicle. 

“You can make soup with the wings,” she called over her shoulder. “You ever tried that? I mean, it mostly tastes like old leather, but in a pinch, if you have enough pepper…”

Vaughn was trying to dislodge his kill from a rock outcropping. “Delicious.” Hidden as he was behind the rock, she could only hear his voice, but his grimace was easy to picture. “Just once I’d like someone to say ‘hey, have you tried eating _this_ monster? It tastes like actual food-grade meat.’”

She grinned. “Listen, I don’t care how long you’ve lived in your little commune, you are so unequipped to go toe-to-toe with me in a grossest foods conte—”

A nearby gunshot swallowed the rest of the sentence. Fiona’s head snapped towards the sound.

“What was that?” came Vaughn’s voice, that frantic note back in full force. “Was that you?”

“Nah.” Two figures, not so far off, had found their own flock of rakks. “Couple’a guys down there are doing the same thing. Told you it was tradition.” 

Frozen by the rocks, Vaughn did not look reassured. “Oh, shit.”

The last rakk was the heaviest, and Fiona struggled to lift it into the vehicle. “Help me with this.” When Vaughn didn’t move, she rolled her eyes. “It’s fine, dude. Look, they see me.” She nodded at the silhouettes as they turned and headed in her direction. “It’s neighborly.”

The gears in Vaughn’s head looked to be turning very quickly. “Okay, you stay with the vehicle, I’m gonna hide.”

“ _What?_ ”

“If they ask, just tell them you’re alone.” He backed further into the shadows and lowered his voice. “Okay?” 

“Vaughn, what the fuck?” 

“Tell me when they’re gone.” Vaughn was already disappearing from view, his scruffy head poking out from around the corner. “Just don’t mention me. Or Helios.”

“Don’t mention…?!” Fiona narrowed her eyes at the receding Vaughn-shaped lump amongst the rocks. “You got some sworn enemies you need to tell me about or something?” 

“You’ll be fine,” he assured her, in a voice that suggested otherwise. “You’re good with people. ...You know. Sort of.”

“ _Sort of?_ ” she hissed.

But Vaughn had completely disappeared from sight, and when she checked again, the two strangers were almost in earshot.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Very excited to write the next chapter honestly, so hopefully it comes out a little faster. Thanks for your patience, let me know what you think!


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fiona learns a bit more about what Vaughn and the Children of Helios have been up to. 
> 
> Sasha and Rhys compare scars.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this chapter ended up being a monster, but I didn't want to split it in two. Half-way point folks! 
> 
> A bit of a content note for this chapter: there's some discussion of, essentially, depression and passive suicidal ideation, though nothing explicit and not in so many words.

“Need a hand with that?”

The truthful answer was “yes”. Despite lifting with her back, like everyone always said, Fiona had only ended up with her knees bent and her arms full of rakk as she struggled to hoist the last kill onto the back of the vehicle. Having both hands fully occupied was not ideal. Even her righteous fury at Vaughn’s disappearing act hadn’t given her the boost of strength she needed. 

But she had her pride, and more than that, she really didn’t fancy owing anything to whoever it was that had sent Vaughn scurrying into the shadows like a kid. 

“I’m fine,” she grit out. “I got it.”

But the stranger—a woman as tall as Rhys and twice as wide—wouldn’t hear of it. 

“Don’t be silly!” she insisted, sending Fiona a friendly smile as she grabbed the other end of the dead rakk. “Here!”

“Uh.” Fiona’s eyebrows shot up at the effortlessness with which the other woman heaved the rakk into the back of the truck. Before she murdered Vaughn, she’d have to ask what his lifting routine was. “Thanks.”

“Oh, it’s no problem at all.” The woman’s smile stretched wider, somehow, and she nodded towards the impressive pile of dead rakk. “You get all those yourself?”

“Yep.” Years of practice made it easy for Fiona to sound cool and casual as she leaned back against the flatbed. “I’m making soup.” 

“Rakk wing soup tastes like old leather,” said a new voice, far less friendly. 

The second stranger came around Fiona’s other side. Unlike her companion, she was a head shorter than Fiona, but with a scrappy, tightly-coiled look about her that made her more intimidating. Her wild hair reminded Fiona of Sasha, back when they were kids, living on rooftops and in alleyways.

“Sounds like you need to add more pepper.” Fiona was careful to keep her voice light, even as childhood memories threatened to pull her off course. 

“I like rakk wing soup,” said the tall woman cheerfully.

The shorter one rolled her eyes. “Of course you do.”

They were both a good decade or so older than Fiona. The tall one had a rifle on her back, the short one a pistol at her hip. Against the two of them, on her own, Fiona wouldn’t stand a chance. 

_Better not let it come to blows, then,_ she thought. Followed shortly by _fuck you, Vaughn._

The shorter one looked around, eyes keen as she inspected their surroundings. Skilled and experienced in the art of deception, Fiona knew better than to check if Vaughn had stayed hidden, but the short woman didn’t react as though she’d seen anything.

“You alone out here?” she asked. “That’s a lot of rakks for one person.”

Fiona lifted one shoulder. “I’m a good shot.”

“That’s a lot of soup,” said the tall one, without a trace of suspicion.

“I know a guy who runs a kiosk,” said Fiona, which was true, technically speaking. “I can sell some to him.” She grinned. “Plus it’s fun.”

The tall one nodded in agreement, but the short one watched Fiona curiously, her head tilted to one side as though sizing her up.

“You look familiar,” she announced. “You live around here? Helios?”

Fiona snorted. “Nah.” Lying was easier when it aligned with the truth. “Pandoran born and bred, baby.” She winked. “I’m from a place called Hollow Point. It’s in a cave.”

“ _Cool_ ,” enthused the tall one.

“Hmm.” The short one didn’t look convinced. “Weird. Could’ve sworn I’d seen you before.” 

“Maybe I’ve got a twin,” Fiona joked. “I’ll keep an eye out. Wouldn’t want her tarnishing my good name.”

The tall one did her the courtesy of laughing; the short one didn’t. She uncrossed her arms, and Fiona noticed an _H_ emblazoned on the front of her jacket, so sloppy it must have been hand-stitched. 

“Nice ride you got.” 

The accusation was subtle, hidden in the weeds, but Fiona recognized danger in the grass immediately. Vaughn’s technical looked nondescript to Fiona—but what did she know? Was there something to mark it out as property of Helios? 

And why would it matter if there was?

“Thanks, just got it,” said Fiona, cracking a grin. They sent her questioning looks, and she added, “Won it in a game of blackjack at a, shall we say, house of ill repute. Kinda doubt he was the original owner himself.”

“Lucky hand,” said the short one. 

“Not luck,” Fiona countered. “Skill.” She tapped a finger to her temple. “It’s all about strategy.”

“That’s true.” The short woman walked around the other side of the vehicle, peering at the two guns propped in the passenger’s seat. “Some people are shit at bluffing.”

Fiona grit her teeth. Having a stranger within reach of her gun when she herself wasn’t made the hairs on the back of her neck prickle, but she stayed as she was, cool and unconcerned. 

“Or they’re overconfident.” Hooking her elbow over the back of the vehicle, Fiona crossed her ankles. “Some people don’t know when to stay.”

The other woman’s lips twitched, a tiny smile gone in a flash. 

“No kidding.” She turned to address the tall one with a directive. “We should head back.” For Fiona’s benefit, she jerked her head in the direction she’d come from. “We’ve got a settlement south of here. Could always use some good shots.”

“I’ve got people back in Hollow Point,” said Fiona, and though she tried not to let it, the lie stung. “But thanks, I’ll keep it in mind. Good luck with your hunt.”

“Good luck with your soup!” called the tall one. 

She waved, Fiona waved back, and then the two strangers were off, walking south again. 

Fiona watched them until they were small specks among the rocks. Then she hopped into the driver’s seat and pulled around to park where Vaughn had hidden. 

“Well, _they’re_ not around to hurt you,” she told the crevice where Vaughn had hidden, “but I make no promises about myself.”

“Sorry, sorry, sorry!” Vaughn emerged from the shadows with his hands raised in apology. “Fiona, I am so sorry—”

“What the _hell_ , dude?” She sent him a withering stare. “You better start coughing up some info, ‘cause—”

“I will.” Hoisting himself into the passenger seat took surprisingly little effort for someone his height. “I will, I promise.” He looked around nervously, even though the strangers were long gone and even the rakks were nowhere to be seen. “Can we just get back to Helios first?”

* * *

Sasha wasn’t used to having another person in her caravan. Aside from short meetings with clients and middle-men to get the job done, she kept to herself. On the rare times she wanted company, she found a bar full of people she’d never see again. The caravan was a private sanctum. 

Now a spontaneous act of charity had broken her own rule. Instincts she’d been cultivating for the better part of a decade were blaring at her like claxons.

What the hell had she done?

She buried her nose in her book, but words on the page might as well have been glyphs. Constantly and perpetually, her attention was drawn over to the driver’s seat. The sight of Rhys at the wheel might have been ripped from an old scrapbook and sloppily pasted into her new reality. 

Years ago, after finding Felix, the devastation that came with learning the truth about Fiona eclipsed everything else. It seeped into every crack inside Sasha and expanded until she felt she would shatter. 

The magnitude of her hurt and anger left little room for any of it to focus on Rhys. Rhys was a knife wound to someone facing a firing squad. Excising him from the strange place he’d come to occupy in her heart was comparatively easy.

Or so she’d thought.

With a sigh of defeat, Sasha closed her book and moved to the kitchenette. Cooking required full attention and provided welcome relief from the whirlpool of her thoughts. Muscle memory was comforting. That was why she’d taken the job with Janey in the first place; using her hands kept her out of her head as well as anything could. Music helped too. If Rhys could get that damn radio working…

She froze, frying pan in hand. She nibbled her lip for a few seconds before she gave in and called, “You hungry?”

“Oh, uh, yeah, actually, now that you mention it.” The driver’s seat squeaked as he looked back to smile at her. “Thanks.”

Sasha shrugged while he turned back to the road. “Don’t expect anything fancy.”

Preparing a meal for two turned out to be one of Sasha’s rustier skills. Her timing was off. Pieces were burnt, ingredients were doubled haphazardly mid-way into production, and the end result was far from picturesque. She hoped Rhys happened to have the same exact taste in seasonings as she did, or at least have the sense not to complain if he didn’t.

On the upside, it kept her mind very busy for half an hour.

When it was finally done, she clicked off the burner and scraped the nicer-looking portion onto a plate. 

“Park this thing and come eat,” she called, an instruction rather than an invitation.

Rhys did as he was told. While he brought the caravan to a stop, Sasha surveyed possible seating arrangements, realized they were lacking, and plunked herself on the edge of the hammock.

“Smells good,” said Rhys, a white lie if ever she heard one. 

His eyes darted from the plate she’d left for him on the table, to the single chair, to the oven mitt she was using as a placemat for the frying pan in her lap. Blood rushed to Sasha’s cheeks, though she hoped it wouldn’t show.

“I don’t host a lot of dinner parties,” she said, aiming for matter-of-fact but sliding past the mark and landing on defensive. 

“It’s all right.” Rhys was quick to be conciliatory, taking a seat at the table and flashing her a smile. “It’s cozy!”

Sasha raised an eyebrow. His smile faltered.

“Uh huh,” she said skeptically.

Rhys flushed. As he started in on the food, Sasha did the same, letting the scrape of cutlery cover up the awkward silence. 

Once upon a time, Sasha could make conversation with anyone. It was an important part of a con artist’s bag of tricks. Break the silence, make them like you, win their trust. Tease important information out of them without giving away anything of yourself. Most importantly, make sure you never fall for your own lies. 

That muscle, like so many others, had long since atrophied. 

She expected Rhys to do the work for her—she was uncomfortably aware of his eyes on her, even as she stared down at her frying pan plate—and yet he kept silent. Was he scared of her, like everyone else was?

When awkward conversation seemed favourable to awkward silence, she finally said, “I can feel you staring at me.”

His eyes were on her neck, but jumped up to her face when she spoke. 

“Huh? No, I was, um…” He turned even pinker than before and gave up the ruse quickly. “Sorry. I’m not trying to be rude. It’s just that...”

“I got old,” Sasha supplied.

“No! No, that’s—that’s not—”

She rolled her eyes. “Well, I did.”

“You don’t look _old_ ,” Rhys insisted, firm enough that she almost believed him. “You just look… different.” 

“A euphemism for old,” Sasha countered, but there was no anger in it. She shrugged. “You look different too.” 

A confused line formed on Rhys’ forehead. “I do?”

“Than I remembered, I mean.” She shrugged. “Things got sort of… fuzzy, after a while.” 

It was the strangest feeling, having her memories flake away like old paint. Realizing she could no longer imagine the quiet snoring that had been her lullaby for so long, or the exact sound of her sister’s laugh.

“Like what?” asked Rhys, a small mercy that pulled Sasha back to the moment at hand.

Sasha tilted her head to study him. “Your eye, for example,” she said. “Thought it was blue.”

Rhys smiled just a little. “Well, it used to be. Had to get a new one.” The smile wavered for a second, but he forced it back to full brightness. “Might change colours again, if I have to replace this one.” He pointed his fork at her. “What d’you think? Could go green. Match yours.”

“Eugh, no.” Sasha wrinkled her nose. “That’d be weird.” 

Rhys laughed and ate the bite on his fork.

“Your hair, too,” she added, emboldened. “It’s redder than I thought.”

Rhys preened with his metal hand. “The sun brings it out.”

Sasha found herself grinning as an old memory floated to the top. “Didn’t you complain quite a lot about the sun when you first got here?”

“Hey, I lived on a spaceship for years, all right? Pretty low on natural light. It was an adjustment.”

“Uh-huh.” Sitting like she was on the hammock, her feet dangled an inch off the floor; she pointed to him with the tip of her shoe. “Still just as pasty, though. That I remember.”

“Oh, wow, really?” Rhys’ eyes rolled in exaggerated offense. “You meet a guy with cool prosthetics and sweet tattoos but ‘pastiness’ is what’s most memorable to you? Tough crowd.”

“I never said it was the _most_ memorable.”

Both Rhys’ eyebrows rose. Intended as a simple correction, the words felt clumsier once they rolled off her tongue. Cheeks warm, she busied herself by scraping the last remnants of her lunch off of her frying pan.

He was staring again. Surely what she’d said hadn’t been that notable. He had a metal arm, after all. But when she looked up, his eyes were on her neck.

Ah.

“Go ahead and ask,” she said, once she’d swallowed her last mouthful of food. “You obviously want to.”

But still he hesitated, embarrassed or shy or both. “I, um…”

Sasha looked to the ceiling in exasperation, then she reached up, twisting her handkerchief out of the way so he could get a better look at her scar. 

It was an ugly thing, she knew, a white slash on her brown skin that stretched down the left side of her neck to the top of her chest, where it disappeared into her shirt. Rhys’ eyes widened at the size of it. 

“Got up close and personal with a stalker,” she said, matter-of-fact. “My fault. Wasn’t counting my ammo. Stupid mistake.” She put the handkerchief back in place. “Vaughn saved my life. I blacked out for that bit, though, so I missed the heroics.”

What Sasha could remember, vividly, was clutching her throat in vain to stem the bloody tide seeping through her fingers. Dizzy and unfocused, heart beating frantic and faint in her chest, she’d laid on the ground, watching the sky and thinking about how different dying felt the second time around. 

No goodbyes. No magic tears. No sense of accomplishment, no feeling she’d given her life for a worthy cause, worthy people. Just wetting the dirt with her blood, alone and unremarkable. 

A very Pandoran way to die. The kind of death she’d been born for.

“When was that?” asked Rhys gently.

“Years ago, now.” Sasha avoided his eyes as she shrugged. “Not long after we found Felix, actually.”

Rhys was quiet. It lasted so long Sasha dared to look at him again, bracing for the pity she saw so often on Vaughn, and Janey, and August. But Rhys’ expression, while sad, was different from theirs. 

Not pity. Understanding.

“I’m going to buy you three hundred of those magic watches,” he told her, injecting some welcome levity back into the room. “And I’ll get you a big trench coat. Stitch ‘em to the inside.”

Sasha’s eyebrows scrunched together. “Like a flasher?”

“Whoa, what? No, come on, I mean those guys who sit on park benches and—” He mimed opening a coat.

Sasha frowned. “Flash people.”

“No! No, the watches are… you know…” He started gesturing to the inside of his imaginary trench coat, but he stopped when he saw the look on her face and shook his head. “Okay, not a mutual cultural reference, then.”

“You inner-planet people are weird,” Sasha concluded, not without a smile. 

Done with her lunch, she plunked the oven mitt and frying pan on the table. Rhys started to gather her dirty things with his, but a thoughtful line had formed on his forehead, and he stopped.

“You know, I don’t know if anyone ever told you, but back on Helios, when everything started going to shit and we all got separated…” His words were careful and measured, but his fingers fidgeted on the table top and he didn’t meet her eyes. “I saw our ship leave. I thought you were both on it. I thought… well, I guess I thought you got what you came for.” 

When Sasha recalled leaving Helios, she recalled mostly chaos: fighting with Finch—or was that Kroger?—for control, trying to stanch August’s bleeding, trying not to worry about the people still on the space station. 

After the crash, she’d wondered often about what had happened to Rhys, where he was, if he’d even survived.

“You thought we left on purpose,” she said.

Rhys nodded. Blindsided, Sasha only stared at him.

“Afterwards, at Atlas, I spent a long time alone. Trying not to think about it, or what it meant, and then thinking about it a lot anyway. It was…” He stopped for a second, lips twisting as he tried to pick out the right words. “Well, it was hard.” His voice crackled with honesty. “I used to think about what I’d say, if I ever saw you again. Depending on the day, sometimes I hated you, and sometimes I wanted to beg for forgiveness.”

Sasha looked away first. She pressed her lips together, staring at her dirty stove top without seeing it.

“I know it’s totally different,” he continued. “That lasted less than a year. I had... other baggage, and we didn’t know each other that long, and frankly if you guys _had_ meant to leave I probably would’ve deserved it. But...” His shoulders rose and fell in her periphery. “Knowing how it felt for me, trying to imagine twelve years of it?” 

Sasha nibbled on the inside of her lip, an old trick for keeping a straight face. 

“Surviving that—not just surviving it, but building something out of it… that’s incredible.” He gestured around the caravan, at the tiny hodge-podge of her life. “You’re really strong, Sasha.”

The unabashed pride in his voice plucked at a chord deep inside Sasha, one so unused it was out of tune. The note reverberated through her chest and left her feeling uncommonly vulnerable.

“It’s not strength.” Playing with the knot of her handkerchief, trying to keep the bitterness from her voice, she lifted her head, forced herself to look him in the eye so he’d get it. “I didn’t have a choice.”

Rhys didn’t waver. He looked down at the scar on her neck and then held her gaze. “I think you did.”

A shiver ricocheted down her spine. Sasha stood up quickly, gathering their dirty dishes and ushering them to the sink without a backwards glance. 

“We should get back on the road,” she said, voice rough. “You drive. I need to get some sleep.”

Rhys stood up too, hovering behind her. He raised one hand, and for a second Sasha thought he might reach out and touch her—but instead he ran his fingers through his hair and walked back to the driver’s seat. “Okay. Sure.”

* * *

They were about ten miles from Helios when Fiona slammed on the brakes, parked the vehicle, and spun around to glare at Vaughn. “Okay. Spill. Who the hell were those people?”

Having been privately hoping Fiona had suffered a minor case of amnesia during their twenty minute silent drive, Vaughn was faintly disappointed. “I don’t know them, I didn’t see them.” 

Fiona sent him a look that could fell a bullymong.

“I don’t know who they were specifically,” he amended. He rubbed his shoulder, a reflexive tick that had never faded. “But I can guess where they’re from. I know the settlement. Due south.”

“ _And?_ ”

“They’re Hyperion.”

“Hyperion? _Seriously?_ ” Surprise temporarily eclipsed the annoyance on her face. “They’re back? How rich are those bastards? You’d think having your damn space city knocked out of the sky would put a dent in your pocket book.”

“I mean they’re like me,” Vaughn corrected. The association stung despite the truth. “From Helios. They used to live with us.”

It was obviously not what she’d expected to hear. She contemplated it with a thoughtful frown, her fingers drumming on the steering wheel. “Sounds like you didn’t open a satellite campus.”

Vaughn grimaced. “What gave it away?” 

But even to his own ears the humour fell flat. Fiona waited, her impatient drumming echoing in his head. With a sigh, he closed his eyes and massaged his temples.

“It’s like I said. After the vault, for the first couple years all I did—all Sasha and I did—was look for you.” 

He paused there, anticipating a reaction. Fiona’s drumming stopped, but she said nothing.

“Yvette—you remember Yvette, right?—she kept Helios going when I was gone. And she was good at it. Organized, efficient. Ruled with an iron fist. By the time Sasha and I…” 

He caught himself at the last second, aborting the sentence before 'gave up'. Fiona’s fingers had tightened around the steering wheel. 

“...by the time I got back, things were coming along well,” he continued. “And then they kept going well. People adapted to living on Pandora. We built better structures, set up better systems. Helios became more of a community than it ever was under Hyperion.”

“Low bar,” Fiona muttered. She looked at him, her keen eyes narrowed as she tried to suss out the bits he hadn’t said. “Okay, okay, so it’s all going great. But…?” 

But Helios’ prosperity had coincided with a personal life in tatters. Rising tension with Yvette, whose eternal dissatisfaction with circumstance drove innovation but drove Vaughn mad. A fraught relationship with Sasha, who worried and infuriated him in equal measure. 

A best friend who’d finally perfected his disappearing act.

Vaughn exhaled, long and slow, trying to loosen the perpetually-tight muscles in his shoulder. 

“We were victims of our own success,” he told her instead. “Yvette used connections she’d made to haggle her way off Pandora. Meanwhile, people started talking about expanding. Things were going so well for us, why not expand? Neighboring communities could use what we had, the skills and knowledge. We could help them.” He paused, studying his hand. “Better them.” He paused again. “Civilize them.”

There was a beat of silence, during which Vaughn prepared himself for the inevitable.

Fiona threw her hands in the air.

“Are you kidding me? Seriously?” Even her laugh was incredulous. “Classic Hyperion! You guys really don’t get it, do you? You can take the giant spaceship out of the sky, but...”

“That’s what Sasha said,” he told her, smiling a little at the familiar response. “She also told me she’d kick my ass if I even thought about ‘starting an empire’, so I promised not to do that.”

Fiona snorted, folding her arms and sitting back in her seat. “How magnanimous.”

“Not everyone was receptive,” said Vaughn. “When Yvette left, one woman started jostling for power, tried to appoint herself Yvette’s replacement. Got a little faction going.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Maybe-kinda-sorta tried to start a coup.”

“A coup?” Fiona laughed again and pressed a hand to her chest. “Ah, Hyperion, the perfect people to teach us savage Pandorans about civility.”

“I know, I know,” he agreed. “It wasn’t successful. Uh, obviously. The dissenters split off, started their own community in the south.”

She hummed. “The women I met.”

“Yeah.” He sighed. “If that was all, I wouldn’t care, you know? People are allowed to leave if they want. That’s their choice. But they’ve started fights with our allies. They’ve started running raids on our base.” 

“So that’s who’s been storming the castle,” she mused, and Vaughn nodded. “Helios has a hell of a lot of resources. Easier to take than start from scratch.” She tapped her fingers in thought. “Moving out’s a lot less fun once you realize you gotta pay your own bills.”

Vaughn remembered the nosedive his diet had taken when he’d started college. He hadn’t murdered his neighbors for their fancy bread. 

“Every raid gets a little more desperate, and the more desperate they get...” He thought of the sniper rifle he’d given to Sasha and his stomach churned. “Both sides have lost people. Morale’s getting worse, at least on our side. People are starting to wonder if...” 

If they’d chosen wrong. If he had any clue what he was doing. 

He slumped further in his seat. 

“I don’t want to start a turf war,” he said. “We’re not supposed to be like that anymore. Besides, most of the people who had any combat skill are the ones who defected in the first place. But the longer it goes on—”

“The more people you lose,” Fiona finished for him. “One way or another.”

“Exactly.” 

Back in college, when they’d been staring down the barrel of graduation and job hunting, Rhys and Vaughn had talked at length about padding resumes. It was normal, Rhys had insisted. Everyone did it. There was nothing to lose and everything to gain.

Vaughn had only been able to picture the flipside: falling into a job he was underqualified for, scrambling, revealing to everyone that he was a fraud. 

He closed his eyes and hid his face in his hands. 

“Anything else?” Fiona prompted. “Any other secret rebellions you need to mention? Sworn enemies? Jilted lovers?”

Vaughn chuckled, but it was humourless. “No. No, I think we about covered it.” 

“All right.” Next to him, Fiona hummed in consideration. Vaughn pictured the gears in her clever mind turning it over. “Here’s my advice.”

Vaughn peeked from between his fingers.

“Stop trying to help anyone,” she continued. “People are ungrateful dicks.”

Surprise wrenched a genuine laugh out of him. He dropped his hands. “What?”

“I’m serious,” said Fiona. “People are dicks! How long have you been looking after these morons, twelve years? No, longer than that! And they still start a damn mutiny?” She shook her head. “They’ve got a whole religion built around Rhys and he hasn’t done shit. Fuck ‘em. Let them tear themselves apart.”

It wasn’t a solution—not even close to one—but watching someone get angry on his behalf was gratifying. A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth as she ranted. 

“I don’t think you have a future in motivational speaking,” he told her. 

Once Fiona let out one last angry huff, she grinned a little too. 

“Did that gig once,” she told him, brushing back her hair. “Set up this whole bullshit self-help weekend retreat, right? _Unlock a better you_.” She wiggled her fingers to accompany the sing-song voice. “Sasha and I, we—”

Her brain caught up with her tongue, and she froze, mid-sentence. Vaughn’s smile disappeared as a dark look washed over Fiona’s face.

“You can spend years of your life—your whole life—looking out for people, and at the end of the day, it doesn’t count for shit.” Her lip curled. “So forget it. Just look after yourself.”

Vaughn suspected she wasn’t thinking about Hyperion anymore.

She twisted the key to restart the ignition before he could think of anything to say. When the engine roared to life she looked over at him with one challenging raised eyebrow. “You sure you wanna go back to Helios? Feels like you could use a vacation.”

Doubting the selflessness of the offer, or the clarity with which it was thought through, Vaughn started to shake his head. “I don’t know, Fiona. It’s—”

“Come on,” she pressed. “When’s the last time you went anywhere? Hell, when’s the last time you did anything that wasn’t about looking after them?” 

“Well…” She did have a point there. As everything had become shakier, the scope of Vaughn’s life had narrowed to so fine a point it might as well have been a needle in his side. “There was, um…” 

“You’re gonna burn out,” she said, firm. “Get away from it for a bit, clear your head. Get some perspective. Strategize without a bunch of adult babies breathing down your neck.”

“I told you to stop calling them that,” he said, though the tiny spark of playfulness in her eye made it hard for his glare to stick. He tossed his head back, one last bout of indecision. “No. I need to go back to Helios.”

Fiona groaned. “Come _on_ —”

“We can leave in a couple days. We need to grab supplies before we go anywhere,” he clarified. “And I’m not taking off without telling anyone. I’m not Rhys.” 

Fiona’s face lit up. 

Vaughn shrugged, but her grin was infectious. “Hey, my thing’s not working, so let’s try yours. Why not.” 

“That’s the spirit!” She shoved him with her elbow, the spark of playfulness a full-blown fire now. It reminded him of every time Rhys had suckered him into a night of drinking or parties or video games when they really ought to have been studying. 

Vaughn hadn’t been good at saying no then, either. 

When she took her foot off the brake and hit the gas, the vehicle sprang to life with such a jolt that Vaughn gripped the frame of the door. “You have a destination in mind?”

“Oh yeah.” She pulled her hat down tight against the breeze. “There’s a few old stomping grounds I’d like to check out.”

* * *

When Rhys and Sasha were both awake, everything was fine.

After the abrupt end to their lunchtime, Rhys feared he’d pressed too close. Sasha slept for hours, and Rhys spent the duration of that long, quiet drive fretting that he’d ruined everything by making an effort, just like he had with Fiona—but then Sasha had woken up, chatted about nothing of consequence, and everything settled into a routine. 

They ate meals together, trading off who got the real chair and who made do with the hammock. When one was driving, the other held conversation, whether it was all the way from the hammock or sitting cross-legged at their side. 

They talked about the weather, about food, about music, about superficial things they’d done while they were apart. Worst meals they’d ever eaten and first crushes and favourite songs. They talked about the boy band they’d both loved when they were young. Sasha told him about her weirdest clients and Rhys told her about the wildest parties he’d been to.

They avoided touchy subjects—like Fiona or Vaughn or vaults or time gaps—with the skill and dexterity of professional figure skaters. It became their unspoken agreement: keep things light and easy. Don’t poke each other’s wounds, new or old. 

That worked just fine for Rhys. Surely if he kept his closet doors barricaded long enough, the skeletons inside would eventually decompose. 

It was only when Rhys was left alone with his thoughts that reality crept in to burst the comfortable bubble he and Sasha created. 

The Pandoran road stretched on endlessly. When Sasha wasn’t awake to entertain him, it took every ounce of his willpower to not be lulled into hypnosis by the monotonous lumps of rock. Vaughn and Fiona never called back, and Rhys never called them. Sasha’s unused Echo sat on the dashboard while he drove, its silence mocking him like a heartbeat beneath the floorboards. 

Trying to rest while Sasha drove was no better. He was too tall to fit the hammock comfortably, and without the help of an adrenaline crash, the awkwardness was harder to ignore. Worries festered and mutated and paraded through his mind like spectres, infecting his dreams and etching away at his sleep.

 _You’re building one shaky house of cards here, kiddo,_ taunted a voice Rhys tried his hardest to forget. _How long do you really think you’ve got until it collapses again?_

Rhys curled onto his side, squeezed his eyes shut and tried to block it out. 

“Hey.” Sasha’s voice filtered through his dozy half-sleep state. Rhys cracked his eyes open to find her looming over head. “Your turn.”

“Right.” He heaved himself up out of the hammock, lower back screaming in protest as he stood, stretched and yawned. “Yeah, all right.”

He started towards the driver’s seat, but Sasha stopped him with a hand on his chest and a keen look in her eye. 

“Hang on,” she said. “You look terrible. Did you sleep at all?” 

“Uh.” Rhys blearily looked down at the one fingertip of hers pressed against his bare collarbone. “Yeah, sure. A little.”

Sasha took her hand away and folded her arms across her chest. “You were supposed to be resting.”

“I know.” He rubbed the sore spot on his lower back, as though a ten-second massage might fix it. “I tried. Didn’t work out. It’s okay.” 

Sasha planted herself in front of him, eyes narrowed dangerously. “I’m not having you drive us off a cliff because you’re tired.”

“I’ll just have, like, six coffees.” He dismissed it with a wave. “One time in college—”

“No. You look like you haven’t slept in days.”

Feeling self-conscious now, Rhys only shrugged. “It’s fine, I promise. I’m used to it. Happens all the time.”

Sasha’s fierce gaze softened like butter in a microwave. She frowned as though mulling something over, looked back through the windshield at the dark skyline, and then shook her head. 

“Stay here a second,” she told him. She swept past him, tugged on the string for the trap door and climbed up to the caravan’s roof.

Rhys did as he was told, standing exactly where she’d left him in a sleepy daze. He hadn’t even noticed this caravan had roof access; he’d never seen her use it. 

Before long, Sasha’s voice called down through the door. “Come on up.”

The sun had long dipped below the horizon, and the nighttime air was chilly. Elpis bathed everything in enough purple light that Rhys didn’t need his defunct Echo eye to see. In principle, the roof of this caravan was not so different from the roof of any other—except when he reached the top of the ladder, he discovered Sasha had covered the whole thing in plush blankets and pillows.

“Whoa,” said Rhys. He froze at the top of the ladder, hesitant to disrupt her creation.

“I like to sleep up here sometimes, when it’s dark out,” she told him, perched on top of the empty chest near the door. “I thought, maybe…” 

Rhys gaped at her. This rooftop sanctuary was clearly a privilege Sasha afforded to very few people. “You thought—?”

“It’s probably stupid.” Shy all of a sudden, Sasha shook her head, one hand fidgeting with her handkerchief while the other dismissed him. “You don’t have to—”

“Are you kidding me? This is awesome, Sasha.” Exhaustion completely eliminated any chance he might’ve had at not sounding like an over-emotional dweeb, so he decided to roll with it and touched her arm. “Thanks.” 

Sasha stiffened. For a fearful second he worried she’d pull away, but she only smiled and nodded towards the makeshift bed. “Go on, then, don’t just look at it.”

Rhys grinned back at her. “Right.”

Actually climbing into the blankets proved to be one of the less graceful moments in Rhys’ generally graceless life. They bunched at his knee, caught on his foot, got stuck under his own weight when he tried to fix them. By the time he collapsed at the end with the pillows, Sasha was laughing at him, and from his jumble of pillows Rhys laughed too.

“I'm usually alone when I do that,” Sasha teased. “Well, sleep tight.”

“Wait.” Rhys twisted around just in time to see her stand up. “You don’t have to… I mean, there’s plenty of room.” He scooted to one side in demonstration. 

Sasha bit her lip, indecision written on her face. 

“Sorry,” Rhys said quickly, feeling like a creep. “Maybe that was weird. I didn’t mean—I just—you said you liked sleeping up here. I don’t want to take your favourite spot.”

“Well…” After deliberating for another second that felt like a lifetime, she smiled. “It _is_ nice out here tonight.” 

The way she climbed in next to him must have been nearly as awkward as the way he had, but Rhys was too focused on giving her space and trying to calm his stupid heartbeat to pay any attention. The space between them was big enough that they weren’t touching, but Rhys was keenly aware of how easily either of them could change that. As Sasha settled onto the pillow beside him, blanket pulled up to her chin, Rhys kept his hands tucked tight to his sides and stared at the sky. 

They laid like that for a moment, quiet and still and calm, but Rhys felt more awake than he had in days. 

“Lotta stars out here,” said Rhys, whose brain, in lieu of something clever to say, settled for something factual instead. 

“It’s funny, I wouldn’t have thought stars impressed you very much,” she told him. “Living on a space station and everything.”

“It’s different down here,” he said. “The scale of it. Every window on Helios looked out at Pandora, Elpis or darkness. Besides, I was…” Making constant mistakes. Brokering a deal with the devil for a corner office. A cog in a monstrous machine. “...distracted. Can’t say I did a lot of stargazing.”

“I love it. It’s nice to know there’s a universe out there, beyond this place.” The sound was so close to his ear that he shivered. “I can still remember when I first saw them.”

“Wait.” Rhys’ brow furrowed. “Saw… the stars?” 

She nodded. “You can’t see stars from Hollow Point. Can’t see the sky at all. Just that cave ceiling, bearing down on you. Keeping you in place.” She sniffed in the cold. “Felix took us out of town for the first time when we were kids, and when the two of them were sleeping I crept onto the roof and took a look. Couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”

“Holy shit,” said Rhys, who could no easier remember his first time seeing the sky than his first breath. “How old were you?” 

“Must’ve been nine. I woke up Fiona, and we…” Her voice caught. “As I got a bit older I liked to imagine they were all planets, imagine what life was like for the people there. What it’d be like if I’d grown up there instead.” The breath she exhaled was almost a sigh. “Stupid kid stuff.”

“That’s not stupid,” he said gently. 

Rhys could picture it so easily he felt a twinge in his chest: little Sasha and Fiona, telling each other stories about made-up planets and dreaming of better lives. He wondered if Fiona had ever believed in any of it the way Sasha had, or if—older and wiser and bearing the brunt of it all—she’d merely been playing along.

“Feels stupid now.” Sasha tugged the blanket tighter under her chin. “I used to think I’d see it myself, some day.” She smirked. “Tough luck, kid: you’re gonna die on this planet.”

“You don’t know that,” Rhys insisted. “You’ve got money now—”

“ _Fiona_ has money,” Sasha corrected harshly—but then she sighed. “I promise I didn’t bring you out here to complain.”

“I don’t mind.” He didn’t. In a weird way, Sasha’s complaints were reassuring. Any permission to peek behind the curtain drawn around her soul felt like a privilege, even if the glimpses he got made him ache. 

Sasha’s lips twitched, but when she spoke, she shone the spotlight on him. “What about you? Why haven’t you been sleeping? Bad back support in the hammock, or…?”

“Well, that probably doesn’t help,” he joked. Under her scrutiny, he found himself squirming, and chose one star out of hundreds to focus on. “No, it happens a lot, ever since…” He ran down a list of white lies before settling on the truth. “Well, ever since Jack.”

“Oh.” Like her gaze, Sasha’s voice was gentle, and Rhys focused even harder on his chosen star. “Wow. I haven’t thought about Handsome Jack in ages.”

Rhys snorted. “Lucky you.”

“Sorry,” said Sasha, “I didn’t mean—”

“No, no, it’s okay,” Rhys assured her. “Being forgotten by the people he tried to terrorize would probably be, like, Jack’s worst nightmare, so that’s something.”

“There’s one advantage to living in the future.” When he risked a look over at her, Sasha was smiling. “Pandora’s still here. You’re still here. He’s not.”

Rhys smiled too. “Yeah.” He freed his left hand from the covers, flipped off the air and shouted at nothing in particular. “Suck it, asshole.”

When Sasha giggled, Rhys did too, letting his hand fall atop the sheets. He looked at Sasha again, and she felt closer than before, even though Rhys was certain neither of them had moved. 

“I don’t know, this whole thing, it’s weird,” he told her. “Sometimes it feels like… like…” Shame caught up to him and he shut his mouth. “Nevermind, it’s stupid.”

“Tell me.”

It was impossible to deny her when she said it like that, so close to his ear, so captivated. Feeling quite warm, he sought out his chosen star again.

“Okay, well, sometimes it…” He took a deep breath. “Sometimes it feels like I was supposed to die up on Helios, or—or with Jack—and ever since I didn’t, the universe hasn’t known what to do with me.” In the beat of silence that followed, Rhys wished desperately for the ability to disappear. “Okay, that sounds even dumber than it did in my head, so...”

Sasha’s fingers curled around his right hand and Rhys’ mouth went dry. The prosthetic couldn’t feel the texture of her skin or the warmth of her hand, but it felt the gentle pressure when she squeezed his fingers, and in the moment that was more than enough. He squeezed her hand in return.

“I know what you mean,” she said, and Rhys doubted he’d ever listened to anything more attentively. “Back when we fought the Traveler, I didn’t want to die. But someone had to use the detonator, and I was right there. So I made that choice, and I got lucky, and I survived.” 

Her voice was thick, and she wasn’t looking at him. Rhys wondered if she’d picked a star of her own, too, and gave her hand another squeeze.

“But then the two of you disappeared, and everything fell apart, and I thought… sometimes, I wondered if maybe it wouldn’t have been better if I’d just…”

She couldn’t finish the thought, but she didn’t need to. Rhys rolled to face her. 

“Hey,” he said seriously. “I’m really glad you’re still here.”

Sasha turned towards him, eyes bright. “You were wrong, what you said the other day. About being ‘some guy’. You’re not. You never were.” She smiled and Rhys’ heart skipped. “You cried while I was dying. That counts.”

Rhys couldn’t be sure which of them moved first. The small space between them evaporated, and while Rhys’ heart thumped in his chest and in his ears, Sasha’s lips touched his. His hand cupped the side of her head, drawing her closer. Sasha deepened the kiss as she pressed against him, fingertips brushing his jaw, and for the first time in days—weeks, months even, Rhys felt like he was exactly where he was meant to be—

Then Sasha pulled away, her eyes wide and horror struck, and Rhys felt his whole world spin the wrong way on its axis, again.

“This is a mistake.” She scrambled to get away while Rhys’ brain scrambled just to keep up. “We can’t do this. This is—this is bad.”

“ _What?_ ” He pushed himself upright too, ears ringing. “No it’s not, it’s—”

“Rhys,” said Sasha, dripping with sympathy and pity and all the wrong kinds of adjectives. “You’re just lonely.”

It was so absurd that he laughed, strangled and humourless. 

“What? No, I’m…” Not? Well, that wasn’t true. He jumped tracks. “I like you! Sasha, I’ve liked you for a really long time.”

“Rhys…” Her voice warbled, but she stayed resolute. “It’s been twelve years. You don’t know me.” 

“I want to.” He did. He wanted to know every stupid detail he’d wondered about for ages, when he’d been desperate at Atlas and when they’d been in that biodome and when they’d been trekking across Pandora as a group. “Sasha, I want to, if you’d just—”

The crumpled look on her face was so stricken that for a second he thought he’d gotten through—but she shook her head. “I can’t. It’s too late for this, Rhys. This is all just… nostalgia.”

Rhys didn’t know what to say. All the air in his lungs had left at once, and he felt strangled.

“This is my fault,” she said, as genuine as he’d ever heard her. “I shouldn’t have let this get where it did.”

He reached for her on instinct, but Sasha stood, and he met only air.

“I’ll sleep inside.” She wasn’t looking at him anymore. “And I’ll take the first shift driving.” She moved to the trap door quickly, climbing onto the ladder. 

“Sasha, please,” he choked out, even though he wasn’t sure, exactly, what he was asking. Everything was slipping through his fingers, again, and he couldn’t—

“I’m sorry, Rhys,” she said, meeting his eyes across the roof from the top of the ladder. She looked nearly as sad as he felt, only she couldn’t be, because if she was, why would she— “I really am sorry.”

Then she was gone, the door falling shut behind her. Lightheaded and heart pounding, Rhys stayed frozen as he was, sitting on her roof in stunned silence, his hand resting on the pillow where Sasha had been just a minute ago.

He thought fleetingly of every college heartbreak, all the times Vaughn had been there to coax him through it, and his wrung-out heart twisted even more. His breathing stuttered, shallow and quick. 

Somewhere, he imagined laughter. _What’d I tell ya, cupcake?_

Rhys hugged his knees to his chest and cried.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please also go check out this [gorgeous older Sasha fanart](http://oodlyenough.tumblr.com/post/183587309998/lesbidar-oodlyenough-and-mondayheadache92) by the lovely @nowrunalong.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While Vaughn and Fiona prepare to strike out on a road trip of their own, Sasha and Rhys cope with the aftermath of a mistake.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So that Borderlands 3 teaser, huh?
> 
> Obviously, this fic isn't written with BL3 in mind and won't be compliant. Officially AU, baby.

_Don’t get attached_ , Felix had warned, time and again, before every job they’d ever run. If he’d taught Sasha anything of value at all, it was that.

She paced the small cabin of the caravan, heart pounding and head spinning. Kissing Rhys was a category of mistake she hadn’t made in a long time. Letting Rhys come along at all was a mistake. He was lonely and vulnerable and desperate, and she—

She was just enough of those things herself to take advantage of it. 

What the hell was she thinking?

Rhys, and the roof, and his warm mouth on hers—it was nothing more than the sheen of a soap bubble, beautiful and fragile and utterly temporary. Maybe Rhys couldn’t see that yet, but she could, and she had a duty to them both to do the smart thing. The mature thing. 

God, Rhys had a way of getting under her skin. A few days with him and she was a stupid twenty-four-year-old again. 

In his absence, she’d written it off as the naivety of youth. The adrenaline of the whole disaster had clouded her brain and impaired her judgment, and then—both times—he’d disappeared before she could shake it loose. Sure, he was more charming than he ought to be, and he was handsome, in a polished kind of way uncommon on Pandora, and he was sweet with her, gentle, unlike—

“Fuck,” she mumbled. She ran her fingers through her hair and gave the ends a frustrated tug. “Get it together, Sasha.”

At the end of the day it didn’t matter if he was sweet or gentle or handsome. Right now, Rhys was lost in a desert and Sasha was his mirage. If he got too close, he’d see right through her, and he’d be gone. No one who saw Sasha—who _really_ saw Sasha—ever stayed.

Not even Fiona.

Her vision blurred as her eyes began to sting, so she shut them tight and climbed into her hammock. In the dark lonesome caravan, all the times Felix had chastised her for getting too close to a mark echoed in her mind. You need to use your head, he told her, over and over again. Your heart gets in the way. 

Or, as Fiona had put it, you let your emotions run away with you.

Thing was, she’d tried. She really had. For twelve excruciating years. She’d cut away all the misguided parts of her that still yearned for things she now knew she’d never find: home, stability, belonging, family...

Fairy tales. Sasha was too old for those. 

Slow but steady, the tide of her emotions ebbed back, leaving her barren. Her cheeks were still dry by the time she fell into a dreamless sleep.

She woke hours later, muscles aching from sleeping tense. Though hours had passed, judging by the faint glow of sunrise creeping through the window, she felt as exhausted as if she’d fought a rakk hive with her bare hands. 

She wondered if Rhys had managed to get any sleep.

 _Breakfast_ , she thought instead, clinging to that simple tangible need like a lifeline. Stretching her sore shoulders, she pulled out her frying pan, grabbed the last of the eggs and got to work. The sizzle and smell worked magic, distracting her from the shadows circling the perimeter of her thoughts. Only as she switched off the burner and reached for her plate did she notice—

“Oh,” she said aloud, to no one. 

She’d cooked for two.

For a moment she stared at the food, struck with indecision and a discomfort in her belly that couldn’t be blamed on hunger. Then she sighed, set the food on the table, and reached for the ladder.

When Sasha poked her head through the trap door, all the blankets and pillows from the night before were stowed away in the chest. At the other end of the roof sat Rhys, with his back to her, a solitary silhouette against the vast sky.

For a split second, Sasha half-hoped he’d give her an out by pretending nothing had happened, brush it aside with one of those see-through grins—

But he didn’t even turn to look at her. 

“I made breakfast,” she said, finally digging out her courage. “If you want some.”

“No.” His back stiffened as he spoke. “I’m not hungry.” Then, after a pause, “Thank you.” 

“Okay.” Calling across the distance felt unnatural. Sasha’s handkerchief twisted in her hand. “I’ll leave some in the fridge, in case you want it later.” 

Rhys’ head jerked up and down, a curt nod. “Thanks.” Perfunctory. 

“I…” Sasha began, but her mouth hung open, caught. _I’m sorry?_ There was nothing to say that she hadn’t said last night, nothing that wouldn’t rub salt in an open wound. “I’ll start driving after I eat. Come in whenever you like.”

Hunching further into himself, Rhys only nodded again. Sasha left him watching the first hints of sunlight paint the edge of the horizon.

* * *

Despite what he’d told Fiona, Vaughn didn’t realize how long it had been since he left Helios until he was getting ready to do it again.

Word of his imminent departure spread quickly and against his wishes, the way all news seemed to. Preparations spiralled into other preparations. Supplies needed to be gathered and packed. Systems needed last-minute checking. People had to be briefed. One day fell into the next like dominoes. 

“You’re stalling,” Fiona accused by the sixth day, barging in while he double-checked inventory. 

“I told you I wasn’t going to run out on them,” Vaughn grumbled, finishing his third recount of food rations. There would be plenty, provided everyone behaved responsibly. “I want to make sure they—”

“You are _absolutely_ stalling.” Fiona marched to where he stood, grabbed his arm and tugged. When he proved tougher to budge than she anticipated, she narrowed her eyes. “Push the baby birds outta the nest.” She made a sweeping motion in the air with her fingers. “Time to fly or die.” 

Vaughn recalled finding a shattered bird’s egg beneath a tree in his elementary school’s playground. He grimaced. “Not a very maternal woman, are you?”

“It’s been a decade, dude.” She folded her arms and challenged him with a look. “You really think the ‘Children of Helios’ can’t hack it without you for a week? Either you’re not giving them enough credit or you’ve been kind of a shitty parent.”

Vaughn set the inventory list back on the shelf, stepping around Fiona and into the hall if only to avoid her eyes. 

“It was easier to leave when Yvette was here,” he said, deciding to deflect from one truth with another. “She ran a tight ship.”

“What, you worried about your succession plan?” Fiona pushed past him with a roll of her eyes. “Hey, you!” She cupped her hands, shouting down the hallway at a man sweeping miscellaneous debris into a neat little pile. “What’s your name?”

“Uh…” Bewildered, the man looked both ways to check she wasn’t addressing someone else before he answered her. “Dennis.”

“Cool. Dennis, you’re in charge while we’re gone, all right?” She didn’t wait for affirmation before giving Dennis a thumbs up. “Don’t fuck it up. Good luck!”

Dennis barely had time to splutter a, “Thanks?” before Fiona turned and left.

Vaughn stormed after her. She was only a couple inches taller than him, but her strides felt long. “What the hell, Fiona? You can’t just—just do that.”

“Can and did,” she said, breezy as ever.

“Okay, sorry I can’t take off at a drop of a hat,” Vaughn insisted, not sorry at all, “but this place needs me.”

“Does it?” Fiona countered, and Vaughn’s eyebrows shot up. “‘Cause I’ve been here a little while now, and I’m not so sure who needs who. I think you like the excuse to stay hidden away, avoiding things.”

The absurdity of the accusation was too much. “That’s ridiculous.”

Fiona ran her fingers along the brim of her hat, unconcerned. “Is it?”

Irritation he’d suppressed for days reached its boiling point. 

“Of course you don’t understand responsibility,” he snapped. “Just because you’ve spent your whole life running from it doesn’t mean you get to lecture those of us who actually try looking out for other people.”

He knew he’d crossed a line when Fiona’s shoulders tensed. She stopped dead in her tracks before whipping around to face him. 

“I know you feel tough now that you’ve spent a few years roughing it here in your space station full of resources, but I was born on Pandora.” She glowered down at him, making those two inches feel like two feet. “I’ve been an orphan since I was eight years old. Don’t presume you know anything about my sense of responsibility, or my ‘instincts’.” 

Vaughn gaped at her, caught between an apology and the stubborn insistence that whatever eight-year-old Fiona might have done, thirty-year-old Fiona was far from it. Before he could make up his mind, she turned heel and continued down the hall fast as ever.

“I’m leaving tonight. Come with, or I’ll steal a car and go without you.” She addressed him without looking backwards. “You need some tough love. I’m confiscating the security blanket.” Her arms spread in the air above her head, crude wings. “Fly or die.”

“That is so not as cool as you think it is,” Vaughn muttered—but Fiona was far out of earshot.

Maybe for the best. He wasn’t sure his temper could compete with hers.

Still, he stomped his way to his office with heavy steps and a scowl on his face. 

So what if he had some reservations about leaving? The world outside of Helios’ walls was still more dangerous than the politics within. Last time he’d been more than thirty miles from Helios, he’d watched a friend lose a fight with a stalker and bleed out in the sand. 

But he wasn’t hiding. 

Besides, who was Fiona to accuse him of hiding from anything? She was a con artist who kept nine million dollars from her own sister. Vaughn could count on his fingers the number of times he’d seen her express a genuine emotion. 

_"Tough love"_ , he thought bitterly. Yeah, right: that was just a nice euphemism for being an asshole. 

He’d almost made it to his office when his Echo rang, triggering a fresh flare of annoyance. He got calls frequently, often from people located somewhere else on Helios asking a question that could have waited. _See?_ he imagined saying to Fiona, as he lifted a hand to take the call. The people here _did_ need him.

Until the voice that came down the end of the line belonged to Rhys.

“Vaughn?” 

Vaughn froze. 

“H-hey, Vaughn, can you hear me?”

“Yes,” Vaughn answered shortly. 

“Oh. Good. Wasn’t sure it was working.” There was a brief pause. “What’s up?”

“What’s up?” Vaughn jerked open the door to his office and sequestered himself inside. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

Rhys’ laugh was like nails down the chalkboard of Vaughn’s spine. “Whoa, language!”

“ _Language_? You disappeared on me, Rhys. The one thing I _specifically_ asked you not to do—”

“I know I should have called,” said Rhys, infuriatingly measured.

“Oh, you think?”

“My Echo’s not working—”

“Nuh-uh.” Vaughn laughed. “You forfeited the right to use that excuse when you let Hyperion wire it into your brain.” 

“It’s not—”

“And you know what, I don’t care that you didn’t call. I care that you left in the first place.” 

“I know, dude, and I’m sorry, I—”

“Are you, though? ‘Cause it’s been days, Rhys.” 

“Yeah… sorry about that.” Vaughn could picture Rhys’ grin over the line, artificial and eerie, because his voice had that slicked-over sound he’d used to charm his way around Hyperion sharks sniffing for blood. “It was a weird day—week… while. Things just happened fast. I needed some space. You know how it is.” 

The trick, Rhys had explained once, three beers in, was to seem so easy-going you were bulletproof. Don’t let them see the soft, squishy parts. 

It wasn’t a voice he’d ever used on Vaughn before. 

“No, I don’t know how it is, actually,” he bit out. “Only one of us has a history of leaving the other behind.”

“Vaughn—” 

“Don’t tell me you’re sorry. If you were sorry you’d stop doing it.”

Silence from the other end of the line. Maybe he’d managed to cut through the teflon of Rhys’ confidence.

Good.

When Rhys still hadn’t said anything, Vaughn asked, “Is Sasha around?”

“No. It’s just me. She—she stepped out. Saw some eggs, and we’d run out, so…” 

“Surprised she left you unsupervised. Guess she trusts you. That’s rare.”

Bitterness crept into Vaughn’s voice before he could stop it. Leave it to Rhys to spend mere days smooth-talking his way into something Vaughn had needed to build, brick by brick, over years. 

All Rhys said was, “Yeah… I guess so.” 

The most infuriating thing about Rhys being a social butterfly was that he never even seemed to realize it. 

“Glad you two are getting along,” Vaughn grumbled. “So what is it? I’m guessing you need something. That’s why you called me, isn’t it?”

“I…” Rhys sounded hesitant. “I was…” 

When he offered no further information, Vaughn let out an impatient sigh. “Cut to the chase, I’m busy.” 

“It’s nothing. Forget it.” With the corporate bravado stripped away, Rhys’ voice was faint. “I—I don’t need anything.” 

It was as transparent a lie as Rhys had ever told, but Vaughn was in no mood to go digging for the truth. 

“Okay, well if it’s nothing, then I’m gonna hang up.” He rolled his eyes to the empty room. “I don’t just wait around for you anymore.”

“I know you don’t.” The first thing Rhys had said so far that sounded completely honest, it pierced through the fog of Vaughn’s anger to strike his heart. “I didn’t mean to waste your time. I’ll let you go.”

With sudden clarity, he pictured Rhys, who-knows-where on Pandora, hopelessly out of his depth and removed from everything he once knew. Wanting things to be the same as they always were, knowing they never could be. 

Vaughn remembered how that felt. All of his anger snuffed out like a candle. 

“Rhys, wait—”

But the line was already dead. 

A cold weight settled in the bottom of his belly, and he reached to return the call only to stop and rub his face with his hands instead. Maybe Fiona had the right idea after all. Ditch the security blanket. Rhys would be fine. If Rhys wanted space, now he had it. Sasha was a mercurial travel companion, but she’d keep him safe. 

And besides—Rhys needed to hear it. 

Tough love, Vaughn thought grimly. 

With a heavy sigh, he rolled his shoulders and set about packing the last of his things. He couldn’t let Fiona leave without him.

* * *

Rhys had never been very good at being alone. 

It was a recurring theme throughout his childhood, the perpetual "needs improvement" category on every report card: talks too much in class. A distraction to those around him. Shows difficulty with independent study. He’d read in a textbook once that only children were supposed to be good at entertaining themselves; when he’d told his mother about it she’d thrown her head back and laughed.

Atlas had been a crash course. Once his health stabilized enough for him to be cognizant of the passage of time, the loneliness of that empty facility had been crushing. He’d talked to himself as he wandered the halls. Acted out full-on conversations with people who weren’t there. Threw himself into prototype redesigns and data digs and cybernetic upgrades. Anything to take his mind off the gnawing chasm in his chest threatening to swallow him whole. 

Even though Sasha was never more than fifteen feet away, being in the caravan now was not so different.

With crystal clarity he saw how stupid he’d been to believe she harboured any feelings for him beyond pity. He felt small and pathetic. Most of all, he hated the gentle voice she used with him—like he was made of glass, and if she wasn’t careful, some watchful shop owner would force her into making a purchase she didn’t want.

So Rhys avoided her as much as he could. If she tried to strike up conversation, he kept his answers short and factual until the talking points dried up. He ate at separate times. When it was dark outside, he retreated to the roof, and when the sun was too high and hot for him to stay, he laid in the hammock and faced the wall. When he was driving, he focused on the endless dirt and tried to forget anything else. 

Echoing in the constant silence of the caravan, Jack’s taunts followed him everywhere, joined by a whole new chorus: _Take a hint and stop trying. This is just nostalgia. I don’t wait around for you anymore._

He found himself returning to a strange fantasy that had plagued him at Atlas—the desire to curl into a ball, to let time pass around him for another twelve years, or twenty, or two hundred. He was sitting at Sasha’s table, indulging that very dream, when the caravan jerked to a sudden stop. 

Sasha marched over, and dropped her broken radio on the table in front of him. “Fix it.” 

“What?” 

“I know this area. There’s a town nearby with a station, and we’re in range.” She nodded at the radio for emphasis. “Fix it.” 

It was so different from how she’d spoken to him recently that Rhys blinked in surprise before reality caught up to him and he shook his head. “I told you, I can’t—”

“It’s just a radio, Rhys,” said Sasha, firm. “Didn’t you build your own arm?”

An arm that could no longer do half of what it was built to do. He scowled. “That’s not the same. And I’m twelve years out of the loop, I—”

“Well, good news: nothing I own is exactly state of the art.” She nudged the radio closer to him and folded her arms. “At least _try_.” The look on her face softened just a touch. “Look, it’s already broken. You can’t make it worse.”

Rhys snorted. “Wanna bet?” he muttered. But Sasha didn’t move, so he took the radio in one hand and pulled it closer to inspect. “Fine. I’ll take a look. But I can’t promise anything.”

“Thank you.”

Rhys grit his teeth as she walked back to the driver’s seat; she’d thanked him the way a teacher thanked an unruly child for cooperating. He dragged her toolbox towards him with his foot and started rummaging around for the right size screwdriver. 

Working on the radio had pros and cons. Sasha’s toolbox was missing anything that would grant him the precision he wanted. He wanted to look things up on the EchoNet and couldn’t. Over and over again, he instinctively tried to scan parts, only to have a cavalcade of error messages flash behind his eye. When he turned it on, the radio emitted nothing but static that cut in and out. 

But it gave Rhys something to think about besides his own precarious existence, an easy inanimate scapegoat for all his agitation. 

Finally, after a lot of muttered cursing and a few accidental shocks that put his right hand on the fritz for a full minute, he was getting somewhere. If he turned the tuning dial just right, the radio picked it up, faint but clear. He leaned closer, reaching gently for the volume dial—

“Shit!” yelped Sasha from the driver’s seat. 

She veered the wheel to the left, and the caravan swung to the side so sharply Rhys braced himself against the table. With a loud thud, something hit the front, and the caravan shook like it’d jumped a canyon. 

The radio slipped from Rhys’ grip and slammed to the floor. For a second the radio blared in his face—way too loud—and then the speakers died with a pop. 

With a few more jolts and several disconcerting noises, the caravan ground to a halt. 

“Fuck,” said Sasha, rising from her seat and peering through the windshield. “Hit a skag. Jumped out of nowhere. Sorry. You okay?”

Dazed, Rhys didn’t answer her. He reached for the radio at his feet. The antenna was snapped.

“Ugh,” she continued, “that is not going to be good for the suspension.” 

He turned the volume dial experimentally; no sound came out. 

“That skag was pretty big,” Sasha was saying. “Hope it didn’t—”

_Bang!_

Rhys hurled the radio at the wall, where it split in two upon impact. 

“Holy shit,” said Sasha.

Rhys hid his face in his hands.

Her footsteps were cautious as they made their way to him. “Um… what happened?” 

“Told you I couldn’t fix it,” Rhys muttered. From the light filtering through his fingers, he could see she’d stooped to pick up the pieces.

“Not the radio I’m worried about,” Sasha answered, low enough that Rhys pretended not to hear her. She set the broken bits aside and walked over to him, a shadow looming overhead. “Rhys…”

“I’m fine,” he said, too sharp to be believable.

“I think I should take you back to Helios.” 

“What?” In momentary panic, Rhys’ head snapped up. “I don’t want to go back to Helios.”

“Well, you can’t stay here,” she said, the gentle sound of her voice at odds with her words. “You’re miserable.”

It wasn’t worth denying. 

“Helios is worse.” Rhys avoided her eyes. “I’m not going back to be stalked by a bunch of creeps who treat the worst day of my life like the start of a religious movement.”

“Okay, fine, not Helios.” Sasha sighed like she was exerting all of her patience. “What about… where were you before? Atlas, right?”

“ _Atlas_?” Rhys laughed outright. “What the hell am I gonna do there? Assuming by some miracle it isn’t home to a roving gang of cannibals by now, what do you imagine is waiting for me? A stolen deed? A bunch of barely-functioning prototypes using twelve-year-old tech? Atlas is nothing, it’s a pipe dream. It always was.”

He was aware that his voice had risen, that the words were barbed and angry, that his heart was beating faster than it ought. Taken aback, Sasha’s eyes widened. 

“I told you earlier,” he finished, voice tight. “I don’t have anywhere to go.” 

In the silence that followed, Rhys’ heart thumped in his ears and his face grew hot. It was embarrassing, having to do this again, having to relinquish the few scraps of dignity he had left. 

“Rhys…” Her face had that infuriating soft expression again. It was out of place on her, made her look like someone who… like she…

 _Just nostalgia,_ he reminded himself, before any caterpillars in his stomach could get any grand ideas. When Sasha stepped closer, Rhys pulled away. 

“There’s got to be somewhere that’s better than here," she said. "I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to be around me.” Her voice turned plaintive. “I’m not good at this stuff, okay? I never was. Even before.” One hand gestured to the caravan around them. “I’m dealing with my own shit, I’m not… I can’t…” 

Somewhere in the blizzard of emotions, Rhys understood. He’d thrown himself at Sasha in a moment of panic, clung to her ankles like a stowaway on borrowed time. He’d left her no space to breathe, no room for her to cope with Fiona’s reappearance on her own. She’d probably wanted to be rid of him the moment they’d driven away from Helios.

Didn’t stop it from stinging, though.

He sighed. “Yeah. I get it.” He stood up, sliding around the table and avoiding her eyes. “You said there was a town nearby, right? How far? I’ll go there.”

“What?” She turned her head left and right like the setting might change. “Now?”

He shrugged. “Why not?”

“You’re not wandering off into the middle of nowhere. It’s dangerous.” 

He dismissed it and walked toward the door. “I’ll be fine. I’m not missing any body parts this time, so it should be a cakewalk. Just point me in a direction.”

She was in his way immediately, barring the exit with her arm. “No way.” Resolute and much stronger than he was, Rhys doubted he’d be able to pry her from the doorway. “I am not letting you take that risk.”

“Risk? It’s Pandora, getting out of bed in the morning is a—”

“ _No._ ” 

She said it so intensely, green eyes blazing, that for the briefest of seconds, his foolish heart stumbled. He imagined a dozen different reasons she might give, things those reasons might mean—

“I promised Vaughn I’d look after you,” she finished, and Rhys felt the last of something leave him.

“Of course you did.” He turned away from her, running both hands through his hair so he could grab on to something tangible. “Right, so you don’t want me to stay, but you won’t let me go—”

“I won’t let you wander off into the middle of nowhere and get yourself killed,” Sasha corrected. “Rhys, you need…” She paused for a second; Rhys was certain she was going to say 'help'. “You need to talk to Vaughn. Did you ever call him back?”

Rhys’ shoulders tensed. “That’s none of your business.”

“He can help,” Sasha continued, ignoring the warning. “He’s good at this kind of thing. He’s—”

“I don’t need you to explain Vaughn to me,” he snapped, bristling as he whipped around. “I know him better than you do.”

“Maybe,” Sasha frowned. “But I’ve known him longer.” 

The knowledge that she was right twisted in his gut. 

“Guess you two are besties now,” he bit out. “Congrats.” 

“Don’t be like that.” Her chastising tone only made him angrier. “Vaughn saved my life when you two disappeared. He’s a good friend. And he’s missed you. You’re hiding from someone who loves you—”

“Me? You’re running away from your sister over a misunderstanding—”

“Don’t bring Fiona into this,” Sasha snapped, sounding angry now. “We are not talking about Fiona—”

“No, of course not, because then you’d have to admit you’re being a hypocrite—”

“—we’re talking about you, avoiding someone who spent years looking for you—”

“You own one plate, Sasha! That’s insane! That’s not even—it’s not even economical—” 

“If you would just try talking to him—” Sasha carried on, a harder edge in her voice now. 

“ _I did!_ ” Rhys blurt out, louder than before, and finally Sasha stopped talking over him. “I did try, all right? And he didn’t want to talk. He’s busy, he’s got his own life. He outgrew me.” The weight of the truth made his shoulders droop. “All of you did.” 

Sasha’s anger flickered and faded. “Rhys—”

“I don’t blame you. Any of you.” He laughed, weak and watery. “Shit, even the fucking EchoNet left me in the dust.” His voice caught. “I’m old tech, Sasha. A collector’s item.” He lifted his chrome hand, waving his fingers so they caught the light. “Obsolete.”

“Rhys…” Guilt splashed across her face in technicolor. She reached for him, and Rhys backed away so quickly he hit the wall. 

“Don’t.” He shook his head. “Don’t do that. I don’t want your pity or—or—or your nostalgia.”

Sasha’s outstretched hand lingered in the air, inches away, but slowly her fingers curled back to her palm. 

“Okay,” she said simply. Her arm fell back to her side. “What do you want?”

Home. Somewhere that felt like home again. It’d been so long.

“I don’t know,” he told her instead. “I used to, but…” Finding his eyes misty, he blinked down at his shoes and shrugged. “None of it feels feasible anymore.”

Her shadow on the floor nodded. “Do you want to stay with me?”

Rhys’ throat burned. It felt like he’d swallowed a baseball. “I don’t know.” His voice cracked. “I… I’m scared of…”

Leaving, and being alone again. 

Staying, and contaminating everything. 

“Okay,” Sasha interrupted, a small mercy he appreciated dearly. “First things first. Right now, we can’t go anywhere until I make sure the caravan’s still working.” Her hand brushed his arm, and Rhys couldn’t find it in him to push her away. “I’m worried that skag did some damage. Can you start the engine when I say?”

“Yeah.” It sounded rough, so he cleared his throat and tried again. “Yeah, sure.”

“Thanks.” 

Rhys sniffed. She squeezed his arm before she let go, a gesture that made him feel equally grateful and pathetic. 

He climbed into the driver’s seat, mind foggy in the emotional aftermath. While Sasha tinkered outside, he stared out the window, working towards a blissful state of disconnection from reality as he watched a faraway rakk divebomb a cliff. 

After a few minutes, Sasha knocked on the windshield and gave him a thumbs up. Nodding, Rhys turned the key in the ignition. The engine caught just fine, purring to life with its usual deafening rumble—

With a loud bang, something gave way. A huge plume of dark smoke poured out from under the hood. Sasha waved her hands frantically. Rhys killed the engine as quick as he could, but the smoke persisted longer, seeping in through the windshield and making his eyes sting again.

“Shit,” came Sasha’s voice as she threw open the door to the caravan. Rhys yielded his place at the driver’s seat, and she poured over the variety of indicator lights that were flickering angrily. “That stupid—” she coughed “—skag broke the—” she coughed again, waving her hand in front of her face to clear the smell away. 

Rhys ducked his head below the smokeline, eyes stinging. “Can you fix it?”

Sasha pulled a face. “Oh, sure, yeah I’ll just digistruct a new—” 

The smoke fogged up the inside of the windshield. Coughing, Sasha ducked out of the driver’s seat, and Rhys followed her. 

“Is this thing going to, uh.” He scratched the back of his neck, searching for a delicate word and coming up empty. “Explode?”

“Explode?” Sasha snorted. “No.” A brief flash of amusement crossed her face, as if he’d just shouted useless commands at a computer screen. “But it’s also not moving again any time soon.” 

“Um…” Rhys glanced back at the smoky driver’s seat. “What do we do now?”

“Now?” Sasha grimaced as she tugged down the ladder to the roof. “Now we get comfortable while I call in a favour.” As she began to climb, she lifted her hand to ear, activating her Echo. “Hey, August.”


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fiona & Vaughn's roadtrip gets off to a rocky start with a stop at a beloved spot from Fiona's youth, while Rhys & Sasha get some roadside assistance in the form of a grumpy ex.

Fiona drove with a cheer both misplaced and contagious. She turned the radio up as loud as Vaughn would let her, bounced along to songs she didn’t know and tapped the steering wheel to the beat. She cupped her hand and stuck it out the window, surfing the wind resistance.

It was as if her earlier tiff with Vaughn had never happened. She was either a woman who never apologized, or a woman who never thought she had anything to apologize for. Vaughn wasn’t sure which explanation to hope for.

The first stop on Fiona’s nostalgia tour was a place called Sven & Dudley’s Den of Sin.

“I love this place,” Fiona explained as she parked. “It’s got everything: gambling, slot machines, skag racing, cage matches, general debauchery.” She hopped out of the car and put her hands on her hips, giving the looming building a proud appraisal. “Pandora in a nutshell.”

Vaughn stared up at the neon logo of an enormous pistol firing at a roulette wheel.

Well, she wasn’t wrong.

“Don’t think I’ve ever heard that as a compliment before,” he muttered.

Fiona swung around the car to join him, giving her popped collar a fresh tug and lowering her voice. “It’s also a great place to make some money if you’ve got a poker face or sticky fingers, and I happen to have both.”

“Ah,” said Vaughn with dawning understanding. “Con artist nirvana.”

“Exactly.” Her walk was spritely as they approached the door. “Last time I was here was my twenty-second birthday. Made nearly a grand using counterfeit chips.” She winked. “It’ll be better this time, now that Sasha’s not here to fuck it up.”

“Sasha?” The words took longer to parse than normal, and when they did, Vaughn stopped in his tracks. “Wait, what does Sasha have to do with—?”

But Fiona was already tipping her hat at the bouncer and pushing through the doors, so he jogged to catch up.

Inside Sven & Dudley’s was pandemonium. Cheers, jeers and the occasional sound of a fistfight mingled with the click-click of slot machines, the clatter of poker chips and the clink of drink bottles. Free of any windows to offer natural light, the whole thing was illuminated in colour, flashing neon signs and multi-coloured pot lights and the glow of dozens of display screens. It was hard to tell through the din just how far the building stretched, but Vaughn had no hope of seeing the end of it in any direction.

He focused on his immediate surroundings instead. To his left, a huge wicker basket was filled with prosthetic limbs of various kinds. Another newcomer walked up while Vaughn watched, plucked his own eyeball out of his head and dropped it in the basket.

“Uhhhh…?” said Vaughn, watching the stranger stroll away casually.

Fiona nudged his shoulder and pointed up. He followed her finger to a hand-painted sign: _ABSOLUTELY **NO** CYBERNETICS!! (Seriously!)_

“Hope you didn’t have any work done while I was away,” she joked.

“God, no.” He wrinkled his nose. “Nursing Rhys through that was deterrent enough, let me tell you.”

Fiona snickered as she lead them away from the entrance.

“Bet he was a huge baby about it,” she mused, more to herself than to him. With a hand pressed to her collarbone she adopted a pout. “Wah, my head hurts because I’m a pathetic bootlicker and let Hyperion drill a hole in my brain.”

Somewhere in the back of Vaughn’s head, a small voice protested that this subject of conversation was unfair—but it was difficult to hear that voice over the bustle of Sven & Dudley’s, and so he ignored it.

“Oh, it was fine for _him_ ,” Vaughn corrected. “He was on industrial-strength painkillers the whole time. Probably doesn’t even remember it. _I’m_ the one who had to make sure he didn’t crack his head open in the shower.” His voice turned petulant of its own accord. “I used up all my sick leave for the year.”

“Gross,” said Fiona merrily. She rubbed her hands together in excitement. “So, what first? Pick your poison, they’ve got all of ‘em.”

Vaughn surveyed the mayhem. “Dunno… haven’t been to very many casinos.” At her disbelieving eyebrow, he shrugged. “Rhys wasn’t allowed in the Hyperion casino either, and he doesn’t like being left out.”

It was a half-truth—like anyone with a basic grasp of probability, Vaughn knew gambling was a terrible investment, a game you were designed to lose. And on a space station that already made ordering coffee in the morning feel potentially life-threatening, he’d felt no need to get his adrenaline rush from a digitized lottery ticket.

But for the moment, he was happy to let Rhys take the fall in Fiona’s estimation.

She rolled her eyes.

“Yvette made me go with her a couple times, though,” Vaughn continued, on a roll now. “Usually when she was pissed at him.”

Fiona grinned. “A woman after my own heart.”

“You would have liked each other,” he said, ignoring the familiar mix of guilt and regret he felt whenever he thought of Yvette. With any luck, Dionysus was treating her well.

“Maybe,” said Fiona, non-committal. “All right, I’m getting bored. Let’s start with the skag races; those always get the blood pumping.” She pulled out a sizable wad of cash, giving it a satisfying flip with her thumb before stuffing it into the inside pocket of her jacket. “I’ve got some money to burn.”

* * *

For the duration of the call to August, Rhys dutifully kept to himself, pretending like he couldn’t hear the conversation. Even after the call ended, he feigned interest in the buttons of his waistcoat, as though he hadn't been hanging on every word.

Any other time, Sasha would have appreciated the discretion. Her privacy was a cherished possession, and anyone who tried to take it from her was subject to silence and derision.

Today, with Rhys, the quiet made her anxious. What if he stopped talking to her again? The recent silence had been smothering.

“August will give us a lift,” Sasha told him, deciding to cut it off at the root. “I can talk to Janey about the caravan.”

Rhys absorbed that information with a nod.

“Brace yourself for about six hundred ‘I told you so’s,” Sasha continued. “She’s been telling me to write it off for years.”

Rhys nodded again. The bottom two buttons of his vest were undone, and he moved to the third.

“It’s hot outside today, isn’t it?” she tried instead, as she watched him work at his vest. “Don’t worry, Hollow Point’s always cooler. Y’know. Cave and all.”

When he didn’t say anything to that either, Sasha resigned herself to the quiet, leaning back on her hands and dangling her legs over the edge of the roof.

“It’s Hollow Point?” asked Rhys suddenly, like he’d only just processed what she’d said. “The town you said was nearby.”

“Yep.” She grimaced. “Told you I knew the area.” She tipped her chin in the direction of the cave. “I used to work at the radio station, a couple lifetimes ago. That’s how I know we’re in range.”

To her surprise, Rhys hummed knowingly. “DJ Rakk Attack. Right?”

“Uh, yeah.” The long-forgotten alias made Sasha’s eyebrows rise, and she tilted her head at him. “How’d you know about that?”

“It was on your ECHOnet profile.” He pointed to his golden eye. “I, uh, lied about not scanning you.” The grin he gave her was apologetic. “Sorry.”

Sasha shook her head. “Can’t believe you remembered that.”

“Well, it’s catchy.” Buttons undone, he shrugged off his vest and set it next to him. “I always meant to ask you about it.”

“Not a lot to say, really.” Sasha crossed her ankles, bouncing them up and down. “The gig at the station was my first—and for a long time, only—legitimate employment. It was small-time: local music, what passed for news, commentary.” She paused. “Mostly of the anti-Hyperion variety.”

“Naturally.” Rhys only grinned. “I’ll bet you were a very passionate host.”

“Oh yeah,” Sasha laughed. “I was 21. I loved the music, and there was something freeing about being honest on air when I rarely was in real life. Felt like I was saving the world by saying ‘fuck Hyperion’ on air.” She shrugged. “But Felix and Fiona hated it. Felix thought I was risking blowing my cover in future cons—someone might recognize me. Fiona was worried I’d catch Hyperion’s attention and wind up on some hitlist. They got me to quit.” Her eyes rolled. “You know." She hooked her fingers in the air. "'Protecting me'.”

Rhys’ grin faded. Feeling his stare, Sasha looked out to the wide horizon. Like so much of the first quarter-century of her life, memories of working at the radio station felt like they belonged to a different person.

“How come you never went back to that kind of work?” asked Rhys. “I mean, if you liked it.”

Sasha squinted against the sunlight, watching in the direction of Hollow Point. It would take August time to get to them, but she scanned for his vehicle anyway.

“I wanted to, for a while. Used to dream about it. That was part of the plan, if I could ever get off-planet. I still love music. But… ” She wound her handkerchief around her finger. Unwound. Repeated. “There’s no money in it, at least not here. And after the vault...”

The once-alluring prospect of speaking openly to countless silent strangers now made Sasha’s skin prickle.

“I don’t know.” She dropped her hand back to her side and shrugged. “Guess honesty kind of lost its appeal.”

“Well, I’m in the market for a new dream job too, so if I find any, I’ll let you know.”

Sasha looked over at him. Long legs bunched up at the edge of the roof, Rhys had laid down on his back, the crook of his left arm thrown over his eyes to shade them from the sun.

“You’re really giving up on Atlas?”

“Trust me, that isn’t much to give up on.”

Sasha frowned. “You could go check. Might not be as bad as you’re expecting. I mean, it was mostly abandoned for a while when we found it, right? Maybe—”

“No.” Though his arm obscured his expression, his voice was sharp. “It’s fine. I’ll find something else.”

A polite way of telling her to drop it. Armed with enough similar lies in her arsenal, Sasha recognized this one on sight and understood its real meaning. Rhys was scared to see what awaited him if he looked for the truth.

There was no use pressing. “What are you going to do when we reach Hollow Point?” she asked instead.

Rhys tilted his head away from her. “I… don’t know.”

“There are always some rooms for rent at the Purple Skag,” she offered. “I’ll be there for a couple days at least, while I figure out what to do with the caravan.”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

“Hollow Point’s a shithole, but it’s no worse than anywhere else on Pandora. You might be able to find work there, if—”

“Great,” he said, the tone at odds with the meaning. “Good thing all my skills are super transferable and up-to-date.”

Sasha rolled her eyes. “Rhys, I’m trying—”

“To help. Yeah. I know.” He let his arm fall away from his face and sent her a plaintive look. “Look, I appreciate it, and I promise I’ll get out of your hair soon—”

“That’s not—”

“—but can we just talk about something else? Please?”

Procrastinating the inevitable. An unsustainable strategy, but one Sasha was familiar with. She clenched her jaw but conceded. “If you want.”

“Thanks.” The uncomfortable silence didn’t settle for long before he asked, “What about your client, by the way? Do we need to call them or something?”

The question caught her by surprise. “Um… no, no it’s—it’s fine.”

“‘Cause I feel like we’ve been on the road for a while, and now—”

“Nah.” She rubbed the side of her neck. “It’s okay. No rush.”

“Are you sure? I thought…” Something clicked, and Rhys propped himself up on his elbows, eyes narrowed. “Sasha…”

Fiddling with the end of her braids, Sasha gave him her most most innocent stare. “What?”

Rhys said nothing. He raised an eyebrow and inclined his head.

“Okay, okay,” she admitted, “I may have… exaggerated… a little when I said there was a job waiting for me.” As his other eyebrow shot up, she added quickly, “I do have a regular client outside Sanctuary. He’s usually got jobs for me. I just don’t… know of one… specifically… right now.”

“You made up a fake job to get away from Fiona?”

“No, I... made up a fake job to get away from Vaughn,” she mumbled. “I didn’t know Fiona was going to be there. Obviously.”

Rhys only gawped.

She fidgeted. “Vaughn always wants me to stay, but I don’t like being at Helios any more than you do. Nothing but bad memories and, until recently, creepy repurposed Jack statues. It’s just easier if I go in with a reason to leave.”

For the first time since they’d kissed, Rhys let out a real laugh.

“Sorry,” he told her, grinning as she turned to stare. “But it’s kind of reassuring to know you’re almost as much of a coward as I am.”

Sasha pouted but could find no argument to defend herself with. “Please don’t tell Vaughn. He—he doesn’t get it, he’d take it personally, but it’s not like that, it’s just…”

“Don’t worry,” said Rhys. “I don’t think he and I are on speaking terms right now anyway.”

He said it lightly; only afterwards did his grin fade, his eyes downcast. Acting on instinct, Sasha’s hand lifted to reach for him—

Then she remembered the way he’d pulled away in the caravan, adamantly refusing her touch, and she ran her fingers through her hair instead.

 _You’re not what he needs_ , she reminded herself. _You have to let him go_. She’d give him a gentle push out of the nest and then get out of his way. Nothing else was fair to him.

“I should pack up,” she said, rising abruptly. “The caravan could be stuck here for a while, I don’t want to leave any valuables behind.” She wrinkled her nose, a self-deprecating smirk. “Fortunately, I don’t have many.”

“Need a hand?” he asked, sadness once again swept under a friendly rug.

“Nah. It’s okay.” As she stepped onto the ladder, she put on a smile she didn’t quite feel. “You look like you could use the sun, Casper.”

* * *

One skag race bled into the next, and the one after that. Vaughn enjoyed the spectacle more than he expected. There was something to be said about standing in a crowd, screaming encouragement at a bunch of undomesticated animals as they chased after a hunk of meat on a hook. (And if one such hunk of meat looked suspiciously like a human leg, well, it was recycling. Probably.)

Fiona’s first-round pick lost, but she got a 3:1 return for her long-shot bet on Pandoran Pharoah. When the third race descended into chaos following Skagretariat’s unprovoked attack of Sanctuary Slew, they cut their losses and headed back to the main complex.

“Love a good race,” said Fiona, ducking around a pair of men trying to settle their outstanding bets with a brawl. “What next? I’m thinking cards, and then shots.” Her face lit up. “Oooh, or shots and then cards.”

She was off to the bar before Vaughn could even reply.

Trailing after Fiona as she hopped from activity to activity, with pit-stops to get increasingly liquored, reminded Vaughn of the handful of times he’d tried to accompany Rhys on his more social of social activities. They had a similar way of weaving through a crowd without spilling a drop of their drink, of cutting in line by catching the bartender’s eye, of blending into groups like they belonged there in ways Vaughn could only dream of.

Methodical fun. To Vaughn it seemed both exhausting and impossible, and yet it was where people like Rhys and Fiona flourished. In the early days of his friendship with Rhys, Vaughn had hoped—naively—it was a skill he might learn to mimic. As he got older, he’d learned to be satisfied by riding the wake.

It was a good thing he had years of practice, because riding Fiona’s wake took skill. She threw herself into each new activity like it was a cure-all, only to grow restless quickly and hop to the next. Whatever gratification she was seeking wasn’t found at the blackjack table, or the slot machines, or the pool hall, or the shooting range.

“Slot machines next?” She flicked impatiently through a Quickchange machine, its screenlight giving her face an eerie pale glow. “Hmmm.” She paused on a long dark with a ludicrous pricetag. “What d’you think?”

She pulled out her wad of cash—considerably smaller now than it had been to start with—and thumbed through it pensively.

Vaughn’s eyes widened as she tucked the cash into her inside jacket pocket. “Is that Felix’s money?”

“No, it’s my money,” Fiona huffed, giving her lapels a tug and lifting up her chin. “Thirty years’ back pay for putting up with his shit and busting my ass taking care of an ungrateful sister.”

The quiet voice in his head protested louder with every passing moment. “Are you… sure you should spend it here?”

“I’ll spend it however I damn well please.” A hard edge in her voice served as a warning.

“I just mean—”

“Sasha didn’t want anything to do with it,” Fiona cut in, uncompromising, all her giddiness evaporated. “You were there. You heard her. Didn’t want a cent. So fine. It’s all mine.”

Vaughn rubbed the back of his neck. He found it difficult to believe even Sasha was stubborn enough to refuse four and a half million dollars.

Then again, it was Sasha.

He decided to try a different tactic.

“Okay, forget Sasha. How much have you spent? Is this really where you wanna blow—” He paused, glancing around and lowering his voice to a volume he hoped was inconspicuous “—that much money?”

“Relax, killjoy,” Fiona chided, turning from the Quickchange machine to glare at him. “I’ve only spent a couple grand—”

“A couple grand?”

“—and I’ve won some of it back.” She contemplated the expensive jacket once more, before finally shaking her head and flicking to the next item in the catalogue. “God, you’re uptight. You know, I thought a decade or so on Pandora would’ve loosened you up a little.”

“What part of ‘Hyperion civil war’ sounded relaxing to you?”

Fiona ignored him. She’d moved on to the next outfit, humming in contemplation. “Do you think this would clash with my hair?” Then she shook her head. “I don’t know why I’m asking, you don’t even wear clothes.”

“I wear clothes,” he muttered, self-consciously folding his arms over his bare chest. “And I think you seriously want to consider how much money you’re spending on whatever kind of mid-life crisis this is—”

A dangerous muscle in Fiona’s jaw clenched, but she didn’t turn away from the machine. “If you’re not having fun, you can go.”

“No I can’t,” he reminded her. “We came in the same car.”

“Then go do some shots until you lighten up,” she snapped. “The whole point of this exercise was for you to stop worrying so much, and yet here you are, worrying about my finances.”

“I wouldn’t have to worry about everyone all the time if any of you would just behave responsibly, which is clearly too much to ask—”

“Or maybe you need to accept that life is chaos, and no amount of micromanaging other people’s chequebooks is gonna stop things like a magic alien box from teleporting you twelve years into the future and fucking up your life.” With the punch of a button, her outfit was replaced by a new one: a dark pink jacket that hung long on one side, over matching pants and a black and white blouse. Adjusting her familiar old hat on her head, she turned to look at him. “If I buy you a drink, will you please chill out and have some fun with me?”

Once again, her imploring look reminded him of the questionable decisions he’d made in his twenties, spurred on by Rhys.

If she was any bit as stubborn—and Vaughn knew she was—there was no point in arguing.

“Make it a plate of nachos and we’ve got a deal,” he corrected.

Fiona grinned. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

The bartender who had served them earlier in the day had been replaced by a massive older man, who watched with narrowed eyes as Fiona ordered a party platter and two of whatever passed for “the good stuff” in this kind of establishment.

“Do I know you?” asked the man, making no immediate move to fill the order.

“I doubt you’ve had the pleasure.” Fiona leaned heavy on the bar countertop, flipping over to her smooth operator voice. “Are you Sven or Dudley? I can never tell.”

The man’s attention was fixed. “You sure you ain't been here before? You look familiar.”

Over the course of his time on Pandora, Vaughn had trained his fight-or-flight instinct to calm down, to not overreact to every possible threat. The prickle on the back of his neck rarely steered him wrong these days, and he looked between Fiona and the bartender, trying to suss out if Fiona felt the same.

“Nah.” Fiona flicked an old beer cap away from the cuff of her new jacket. “I’ve been on the road for a very long time.”

The bartender nodded, but his eyes narrowed and he stepped back to the wall behind the bar. For the first time, Vaughn looked past the neon lighting to see the wall was plastered with bounties and missing persons and classified ads. The bartender flipped through a stack of papers pinned one on top of the other, until he plucked one very old, very yellowed one from the pile.

He held it up for both of them to see. The top read _BANNED FOR LIFE_ , with several emphatic underlines beneath the word “life”. The bottom read _FRAUDS & CHEATS_, with several emphatic exclamation points. In the middle was an old photograph of two young women wearing shocked expressions at a blackjack table. Despite the danger, Vaughn couldn’t help but lean in for a better look. Even in the picture, Fiona had the same coloured streak in her hair.

They both looked so young. Sasha must have been in her teens.

“What?” asked the present-day Fiona beside Vaughn, almost convincingly nonplussed.

Sven-or-Dudley narrowed his eyes even more.

“Oh come on,” said Fiona, her silky-smooth voice starting to catch. “That’s ancient.” She put on a smarmy grin and gestured to her own face. “Do I look like I could be in that twenty-year-old photo?”

Sven-or-Dudley took a lumbering step closer and pulled a shotgun out from under the bar.

Fiona’s collected look evaporated instantly, replaced by wide eyes as she shrunk back.

“Uh…” Her eyes darted back and forth until she locked onto a target: an unsuspecting man drinking a beer at the other end of the bar. “That dude’s got an ECHO Eye,” she said.

In the second that Sven-or-Dudley’s attention was diverted, Fiona booked it, scrambling away from the bar and towards the door in a flash of pink.

“Sorry,” said Vaughn, more or less sincere, right before he flicked on all the beer taps and took off after her.

* * *

Never one for preamble, August’s first words to Sasha when he walked through the open door of the caravan were, “The hell did you do to this thing?”

“Hit a skag.” Sasha glanced back at him as she finished zipping up the bag she’d been packing. “Damn thing came out of nowhere.”

She straightened up, doing one final scan of the caravan’s interior. Though convenient, the fact that her life could be packed away in two tote bags was not a point of pride. A faint twinge of embarrassment warmed her cheeks as she reached for the last thing worth keeping: the sniper rifle from Vaughn.

“Huh. Least it wasn’t a rakk hive. I’d be scraping you out of the rubble.” August reached for one of the bags, but didn’t protest when Sasha grabbed them both. “Hey, did I see someone on your roof?”

“Oh.” More heat rushed to Sasha’s cheeks. “Yeah, uh, about that…”

Like he’d been cued by a stage director with a knack for comic timing, Rhys chose that moment to open the trap door and make his way down the ladder. August turned at the sound, and though she couldn’t see his face, Sasha could well imagine his expression.

“H-hey, August. Long time no see.” Rhys waved with one hand and brushed his hair back with the other, so excruciatingly awkward that the corner of Sasha’s mouth twitched in amusement. “Uh. For you.”

“What the fuck?” August took a disbelieving step towards Rhys, looked back at Sasha as though to check that she was seeing it too, and then turned to Rhys again. “Sasha, what the fuck?”

“Surprise,” said Sasha.

August’s jaw worked up and down as he opened and closed his mouth, trying to find the right words for his confusion. Eventually he settled on, “Why the hell does he look like that?”

“I moisturize,” said Rhys dryly.

August peered at Rhys so closely that he leaned backwards. “Is this one of those digistruct disguises?”

Rhys swatted August’s hand away as it moved to poke him in the forehead. “Hey!”

August turned to face Sasha instead, lowing his voice to be a little more discrete. “Is this a sex thing?”

“ _What?_ ” yelped Rhys.

“No, it’s just Rhys,” said Sasha, losing the battle to hide her smirk. “I was with Vaughn a few days ago. The Vault gave us an anniversary gift.” She tipped her chin in Rhys’ direction. “They’re back.”

“Both of them? Where the hell were they?”

“I’m right here,” Rhys added, audibly annoyed now. “Will you stop talking about me like I’m a mannequin?” He folded his arms and made use of the extra inch or two he had over August. “And Fiona and I weren’t anywhere. We went into the Vault, there was a big magic box, we touched it, it gave us a one-way express ride to the future.” He spread his arms in sarcastic presentation. “Voila.”

August was momentarily silent as he processed the story.

“Bullshit,” he said after a second.

Rhys threw his hands into the air. “It’s true!”

But August had turned back to Sasha. “You’re not buying this?”

This only incensed Rhys further; he crossed his arms over his chest and scowled at the wall.

Sasha ignored the theatrics. “Look at him, August. Does he look like it’s been twelve years?”

“Nine million dollars can buy a lot of plastic surgery,” August reasoned.

“I did not have plastic surgery!” Rhys’ voice got higher as he became more indignant. “Or nine million dollars,” he muttered as an afterthought.

“Fiona has the money,” Sasha clarified. “Didn’t tell him about it either.”

“Where’s she?”

“With Vaughn, last I knew. Swimming in her pool of money, for all I care.” Sasha gave the best indifferent shrug she could muster with heavy bags on either shoulder. “Not my business.” She caught the matching expressions on Rhys and August’s faces, but elected to ignore them and stepped out of the caravan. “Let’s get going. We can chat in the car.”

* * *

Fiona already had the engine running by the time Vaughn fought his way out the door and caught up to her. How the hell had she moved so fast? He’d barely heaved himself into the car before she kicked it into gear, speeding out of Sven & Dudley’s parking lot.

A shot whizzed over their heads a second later. Vaughn sank down instinctively, but Fiona only tightened her grip on the steering wheel.

“You wanna deal with that?” she asked, while the accelerator roared.

“Not really,” he muttered. But he grabbed his gun and spun around in his seat anyway, trying to make out shapes through the dust kicked up by their tires.

Only one vehicle pursuing them. That was something.

While Vaughn tried to line up his shot, the gunner in the other car took two more. One went wide; the other dinged off the tailgate.

“Hold on,” said Fiona.

Before Vaughn could process the instructions, the car veered to the right.

It threw off Vaughn’s shot, but threw off the gunner’s shot too—a couple more bullets sank into empty dirt. Vaughn raised his gun and fired, a mostly-blind shot that wedged itself somewhere into the front fender. Right as he squeezed the trigger a second time, Fiona veered their car to the left.

“Take out their tires!” she yelled over the noise.

“I’m trying.” Vaughn looked away from the sight long enough to glare at her. “Why do you keep swerving?”

“Makes us harder to hit.” She swerved again.

Vaughn grit his teeth as his shot went wide and hit the ground uselessly. “It also makes it harder for _me_ to hit _them_. Just hold still!”

“Do it fast then.”

She kept the car steady. The wing mirror beside him exploded as a bullet ripped through it. Vaughn ignored it, steadied his shot, and fired.

The front left tire went with a bang. Sacrificing precision for firing rate, he emptied the rest of the clip in quick succession. Another bullet caught the right tire, and with both tires shredded, the car spun out and ground to a stop.

“Well done,” said Fiona, grinning at the sight in her rearview mirror.

The praise had little impact. Adrenaline still pumping, Vaughn set the gun down and turned to scowl at her. “What the hell was that? Did you forget something back there?”

“Yeah, my hat.” Fiona patted the empty space on top of her head with a pout, then looked to him expectantly. “Why? Did you grab it?”

Completely agog, Vaughn stared at her. “Me. I meant _me_.”

The hopeful look in her eyes was instantly replaced by annoyance. “I didn’t forget you, you’re right here.”

“No thanks to you!”

“Oh please.” With the threat of the chase gone, her grip on the wheel loosened, her posture casual again. “What was I supposed to do, carry you?”

“You could have waited,” Vaughn insisted.

“Forgive me for thinking you could find your way out of a bar.”

“You were about to leave! You had the engine running!” He shook his head in disbelief. “You know, I don’t remember you being this selfish.”

“I remember you being this needy, but I hoped you’d grown out of it,” Fiona shot back. “I had the engine running so we could leave faster. Should I have waited until we were both shot?” She lifted one hand off the wheel in frustration. “God, you’re just like Rhys and Sasha. Would it kill you people to give me some benefit of the doubt?”

“You haven’t exactly done anything to earn it,” Vaughn grumbled.

She kept her eyes on the road, no doubt grateful for an excuse to avoid eye contact. A muscle in her jaw clenched as the bitterness finally bled into the open. “None of you’d believe it anyway.”

 _Not at this rate_ , he thought, but valued his general safety too much to say it. “You could have at least warned me we were going somewhere that had a price on your head.”

“I told you about the counterfeit chips,” she shot back.

“You didn’t tell me you got caught!”

“For the record, _I_ didn’t get caught. Sasha got us caught. She got sweet on the dealer we were supposed to be conning and ruined the whole thing.” Despite all the intervening time, Fiona’s sisterly resentment over the botched birthday was strong. “How was I supposed to know they’d remember? It’s been like twenty years, who keeps track that long?”

“Guess I should stop waiting for an apology then.”

“That’s the most sensible thing you’ve said yet.”

At least Fiona’s refusal to admit fault made a change from Rhys’ empty apologies.

With one last glare that went ignored, Vaughn settled back into his seat. He crossed his arms in a show of defiance, but wound up hissing in pain instead as something sharp dug into his side. “What the…?”

The culprit wasn’t hard to find. A piece of glass from the wing mirror stuck straight out of his vest, wedged deep enough when he’d crossed his arms to pierce his skin.

“You all right?” asked Fiona.

“Yeah.” He plucked out the glass and tossed it from the car, watching the landscape roll by in strained silence. “Just a scrape.”

“Okay.” The tiny frown on her lips held an even tinier hint of regret. “Good.”

Off in the distance, two skags played tug-of-war with a bone the size of Vaughn.

Fiona broke the silence first, a reassuring sign that it was making her uncomfortable, too. “Nice shots, by the way.”

“Thanks.” For a vindictive second he thought about leaving her to languish in it. But as he was reasonably sure he’d suffer for it more than she would, he relented. “Swerving, really?”

“Someone... told me it might work. Thought I’d give it a try.” Fiona shrugged. “And we’re still alive, so I guess I can’t disprove it.”

“So,” he said. “Where to next? You banned from anywhere else?”

“Probably.” She grinned. “Y’know, I’m actually kind of flattered. Should’ve asked them if I could keep a copy.”

“You guys must’ve made off with a lot to make an impression.”

Fiona shook her head. “Zilch. They took everything off us when we got caught, even our real cash. Only reason they didn’t kill us was because Sasha was so young and the dealer thought they were in love.” She adopted a simpering expression before rolling her eyes. “I was mad Sasha ruined my birthday; Sasha was mad we were standing in the way of her great romance.”

“Huh.” Even factoring in the young girl from the yellowed old poster, Sasha swooning over a card dealer seemed impossible. “Hard to picture Sasha as a romantic.”

“You didn’t know her as a teenager.” Fiona snorted. “Got obsessed with this inner-planet band when she was twelve and it was all downhill from there.” She pushed her coloured hair behind her ear. “But hey, good to hear she grew out of it. Finally.”

In the years following Rhys and Fiona’s disappearance, Vaughn had been granted a front row seat to what the aftershocks had done to Sasha. While he’d let himself be consumed by the Children of Helios, Sasha became a remote island, difficult to access and hostile to trespassers.

Vaughn wouldn’t have called it growth. He’d have called it retreat.

But his mind drifted back to the call with Rhys, how quickly and easily he and Sasha had taken off together, and Vaughn’s sympathy flatlined.

“Guess so.” With the warm breeze on his face, he took down his ponytail and ran his fingers through his hair. “Where’d you say we were going?”

“I didn’t,” Fiona answered. She drummed pensively on the steering wheel. “I, er, kind of thought we’d be spending the night there.”

“They’ve got rooms?” Unexpectedly grateful for the change in plans, he suppressed the shudder and gave it some thought. “Well, I know some people who might put us up, but I’m not sure how much you’re going to like it. On the bright side, we could get a new wing mirror.”

* * *

“You could have given me a heads up.”

Half-way to Hollow Point, the ride so far had been characterized by forced pleasantries, awkward silences, and, finally, the music of Hollow Point Underground Radio rattling through August’s tinny speakers. Lost in the bassline of an old favourite song, it was a moment before Sasha realized what August had asked.

“Worried you’d think I lost my mind.” Sasha looked away from the dust to face him. “Seemed easier to explain in person.”

“I do think you’ve lost your mind,” August countered. “How the hell did he wind up on the road with you?”

Sasha glanced towards the back seat. Rhys was slumped down, eyes closed, chin lolled against his chest. Asleep.

“He asked,” she told August.

“He _asked_? And you let him? That’s it?” August didn’t so much roll his eyes as his whole head. “Hell, Sasha, how many times did I offer to—”

“Exactly. You _offered_ , like you'd be doing me a favour, because you thought I needed help, which I don’t—”

 _“_ You definitely need help,” August muttered.

“—Rhys asked because he’s sensible enough to want away from Helios.”

“Where’s Fiona, then?”

The way her expression soured at the mention of her sister was almost instinctual. “None of my business. She can do whatever she wants.”

“You’re mad at her but not him? That doesn’t make any sense.”

Sasha clenched her jaw. “Rhys didn’t have anything to do with the money, or Felix.”

“You believe that?”

“Yes.”

August sighed, a disappointed sound that made Sasha bristle. “I thought you’d figured out what kind of people they are.”

“Oh, don’t act like you’ve got some kind of deep insight I don’t,” she said. “You barely knew them.”

“It’s not insight. It’s objectivity, which you’ve never had when it comes to those two—”

“Rhys isn’t lying to me. I—” Her well-practiced tongue skipped over the word _trust_. “I know he’s not.”

August made a noise encapsulating disbelief and scorn at the same time. “How can you possibly say that? You remember he had Handsome fucking Jack in his head, right?”

Sasha cast a paranoid glance back at Rhys, but he hadn’t moved. “Keep your voice down.”

August snorted. “Oh, yeah, sure, wouldn’t wanna wake the baby.”

“Get over yourself,” she snapped, temper flaring. “This jealousy of yours is why we stopped seeing each other.”

He shook his head. “No, we stopped seeing each other because I got sick of watching you throw your life away for a pair of ghosts.”

“Right, because I’m the over-emotional idiot and you’re the martyred voice of reason.” Lips twisted in a sneer, Sasha shook her head. “That is such bullshit.”

“You could’ve been off Pandora years ago. But no, you chose to waste away here, pining after some selfish assholes.”

Sasha’s nails bit into the heel of her palms as she clenched her fist, the anger bubbling in her chest threatening to boil over. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“The fuck I don’t. That woman—”

“Ugh, shut _up_!” Sasha’s own rule fell by the wayside as her voice rose. “You know what our real problem is? You think you know me, but you’ve never been able to see past who you wish I was.”

August laughed. “Whose fault is that?”

Sasha grit her teeth. In the uncomfortable momentary silence, she chanced a look back at Rhys, still dead to the world.

Good. This wasn’t a conversation he needed to hear; he had enough baggage on his own without being the bellhop for any of Sasha’s.

“Look.” August’s new tone was measured, an attempt to de-escalate that made Sasha’s skin prickle anyway. “I get it with your sister. Family’s… weird. It’s hard to let go, even if you want to. Even if you should.”

Sasha said nothing. She played with her handkerchief while August flexed his fingers around the steering wheel.

“But him?” He gestured to Rhys with a jerk of his head. “You barely even knew him. Why is he really here?”

“I told you—”

“Come on. Seriously.”

August’s questions were the same ones she’d been asking herself for days; in all that time, she’d yet to come up with answers that sated her own curiosity, let alone his.

She looked back at Rhys as she thought it through, watching the steady rise and fall of his chest. Light pink dusted the exposed skin of his face and neck, a gift from the high Pandoran sun. Sleep washed all the worry from his face, leaving behind only his startling youth and the familiar magnetism Sasha had all but forgotten in his absence.

Once upon a time, for a few short weeks, Rhys had known Sasha as she truly was: no tricks, no cons, no personas or careful performances.

And he’d liked her anyway.

No one had ever done that before.

The simple truth of it sank through her like a stone, an anchor weighing down her heart. Swallowing past the lump in her throat, Sasha squinted at the open road and chose an answer August would believe.

“I felt bad for him,” she said quietly, folding her hands tight in her lap. “He doesn’t have a job, doesn’t have anywhere to go. His whole world’s upside down. He’s not handling it well.” She picked at a chip in her nail polish. “I know what that’s like.”

Mollified but far from thrilled with the response, August sighed. “Yeah, well, he should find someone else to play therapist. You don’t owe him shit.”

“Relax, he’ll be gone soon.” As the cave mouth of Hollow Point crested over the horizon, her stomach did uneasy somersaults. Hollow Point always had that effect; that was all it was. “I told him it was for the best.”

“Good,” said August.

Sasha stayed quiet. Movement sparked in her periphery vision as Rhys curled to the side, his head angled away from her, his face half-hidden in shadow.

* * *

Janey and Athena Springs lived in what passed for the nicer part of Hollow Point. The buildings were a little sturdier, the street-lights went out less frequently, and the etiquette of finders-keepers held a little less water.

To Fiona, it was memorable as the place she and Sasha would dumpster dive sparingly, a neighbourhood where raggedy street urchins were conspicuous and likely to take a precautionary bullet between the eyes. Despite the brand new clothes, the millions sitting in her inventory and Vaughn’s repeated assurances that Janey and Athena did not hold any long-standing grudges, trepidation still haunted Fiona as they approached the door and knocked. With no hat to adjust, she stuck her hands in her pockets instead.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” she asked Vaughn, grabbing his wrist before he could knock on the door.

“For the seventh time: yes, totally.” He said it so casually she felt the opposite of reassured.

“Right, right. It’s just, I wouldn’t want to impose, you know.” She lifted a nonchalant shoulder. “I mean, I’ve got the money, I could put us up somewhere nice.”

“Somewhere nice?” Vaughn raised an eyebrow. “The only other place in Hollow Point that I trust enough to sleep at is the Purple Skag. You wanna go there instead?”

Fiona wrinkled her nose. “Point taken.”

“Besides, you didn’t hear Janey on the Echo.” Wrist freed, Vaughn knocked on the door. “She’s—”

He’d barely knocked once before the door jerked open and an enthusiastic blonde blur launched herself at Fiona with such force that she staggered back a step.

“...excited,” finished Vaughn, with a barely-concealed laugh.

“Whoa,” said Fiona, stunned and unable to lift her arms. “Hey, Janey.”

“Fiona!” With another bone-crushing squeeze, Janey let go to get a better view. “My god. You look just how I remember!” Her eyes fell on the new clothes. “Well, more or less.”

The same could not be said for Janey, whose hair had been cut shorter than ever, all the length on top pushed to one side. With her mouth stretched into an enormous grin, she looked as happy as Fiona remembered her.

Fiona forced a grin in return. “All part of the magic trick.”

“I can’t believe you’re here!” Gathering herself, Janey beckoned the two of them into the door of her home. “Thought Vaughn was messing with me when he called.” She reached out to give his shoulder an affectionate shove. “Good to see you too, mate. Been a while. Didn’t think you left Helios much these days.”

“Hi, Janey,” said Vaughn. “This place looks great.”

The conversational redirect didn’t go unnoticed or unappreciated by Fiona, who fell into step behind them. With no point of comparison, she had nothing to offer on Janey’s interior decorating, and hummed politely in response instead as her host pointed out new furnishings and other decorations. As Janey led Vaughn into the sitting room, Fiona lagged behind, inspecting this brand-new glimpse into the world that had carried on without her.

Hung on the wall in the hallway was a framed photo, out of date by years, of Janey and Athena arm-in-arm and wearing white. Janey held a bouquet of purple flowers that matched Athena’s hair. Even in the picture, there was a visible flush to Athena’s cheeks, a glimmer in her eye that Fiona had rarely seen. Both of them looked incandescently happy.

Fiona felt a faraway pang in her chest as she studied the photo. She’d only just been invited to a real wedding, and already she’d missed it. What was the food like? The ceremony? Had people danced?

Had Sasha been there? Had she allowed herself to have fun, or had she sat in a corner table like a grumpy wallflower?

Fiona tore her gaze away, turned down the hall, and nearly collided with Athena.

“You’re back,” said Athena, plain as ever.

“Uhh, yep.” Fiona rocked on her heels. “Funny story about the Vault—”

“Janey told me,” said Athena, and Fiona was grateful to be spared recounting the whole stupid story again. Athena’s lips pulled into a small, tight frown. “Vaults are risky business.”

“Ha, now you tell me.”

“I always told you.”

Older than the rest of them to start with, the change in Athena was the most noticeable. It wasn’t only the rivers of white running through her hair, the way it was long enough now to be pulled back into a bun, or the laugh lines starting to bloom on her face. It was the set of her shoulders, the way she held herself. Relaxed. Calm.

Whatever time had done to Sasha, it’d had the opposite effect on Athena.

“Welcome back,” said Athena. The corners of her lips turned up in a smile. “It’s good to see you.”

Fiona’s throat felt funny, so she cleared it. “Y’know, this is the warmest welcome I’ve had yet. Thanks.”

A fine line of concentration appeared between Athena’s eyebrows. “Really?”

“So!” called Janey from the sitting room, hands on her hips like she was preparing to assess the problem. “A skag tore up the undercarriage?”

“Huh?” Fiona raised an eyebrow. “Nah, someone shot off the wing mirror. Should be an easy fix.”

A confused line to match Athena’s appeared on Janey’s forehead. “That’s not what Sasha said.”

“Uh.” Vaughn’s glanced nervously in Fiona’s direction. “Sasha?”

Athena’s frown returned.

“She called,” Janey said. “Said she needed to talk about the caravan.”

“Is she in Hollow Point?” asked Vaughn.

“I’m not sure, I—”

“Is anyone with her?” He sounded keenly interested now, for reasons Fiona guessed had less to do with Sasha and more to do with her stowaway.

“I don’t know.” Janey was shaking her head. “I figured she was with you, I thought you’d all want to be together since…”

Fiona’s laugh overrode the end of Janey’s sentence.

“Oh, no. Soon as I got back she threw a temper tantrum.” The eyes of the other three widened, but the short fuse inside Fiona ever since the Vault had been reignited. “Went gallivanting off with her idiot boyfriend.”

“Rhys isn’t my boyfriend.”

Fiona’s eyebrows rose in surprise at the sound of her sister’s voice. She turned just in time to watch Sasha stroll through the open door.

“And it wasn’t a temper tantrum, I had a job to go to.” Head held high, she brushed past Fiona without a glance to greet the others with nods. “Janey, Athena. Vaughn. Should I come back later?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Road trip's over! Thank god, says everyone. This chapter took longer than I would've liked, sorry about that! Shout-out to @AnnaLytic who read it through and gave me some pointers so the rest of you could read something better.
> 
> We broke 100 pages this chapter! Longest coherent thing I've ever written by myself. I'm still aiming for ten chapters, but anticipate the next one will run quite long. It's a good one though, I swear.
> 
> Say hi over on Tumblr and witness me periodically whining or bragging about character counts: [@oodlyenough](https://oodlyenough.tumblr.com/tagged/anachronism)


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While Fiona's caught in the mess of the present, Rhys wrestles with the ghost of choices past.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter count went up one, as you might have noticed, because even at 10k (!), this chapter doesn't cover everything I initially outlined for it. Whoops. 
> 
> **Content warning** for this chapter in particular: we again deal with some references to suicidal ideation, slightly less oblique than they were last time. (Not sure, at this point, if the whole fic should be tagged? Open to suggestions.) 
> 
> Also note a new tag: canon-typical violence.

“How about I get everyone a drink, and we all sit down?” 

Janey’s attempt at defusing the tension in the room only made Fiona more keenly aware of it. It didn’t help that Athena was looking between the sisters with narrowed eyes, trying to decode the animosity between them. 

“Drinks would be great,” Vaughn agreed, his own discomfort clear even through the smile. “Hey, Sasha, is it—uh—just you?”

He leaned around her to watch the door expectantly, and Fiona followed suit, but no one else entered.

“Just me. And I’m not staying that long,” said Sasha quickly, raising one hand to stop Janey from playing hostess. 

“Just you?” repeated Vaughn. “Where’s—” 

“I just wanted to talk about the caravan,” Sasha carried on. “I can come back later.” 

Janey frowned. “No, no, it’s okay, you said you—”

“Hit a skag, yeah,” said Sasha. “Couldn’t get a good look at the damage, but I can’t drive it.”

The derisive snort came out before Fiona could think better of it. “You totalled your car on a skag?”

Sasha ignored her and addressed Janey. “We left it where it was, it’s about an hour out of town. I was hoping you could help me figure out what’s wrong.”

“I dunno, Sasha.” Janey’s smile had faded into a frown as she absorbed the information, and she reached up to ruffle the hair on the top of her head in thought. “You sure it’s worth fixing? What it’ll cost…”

“I can do the work myself,” said Sasha.

“You can?” asked Fiona, eyebrow raising in surprise. “When did you learn about cars?”

Sasha’s eyes rolled. “This doesn’t involve you.”

“It was a genuine question!” Palms raised in frustration, Fiona shook her head. “You are such a child.”

Sasha shot her a dark look before turning back to Janey. “I’ll just need to buy some parts off you, probably.”

Janey’s frown persisted. “You’ve sunk so much into that thing already, you’d be better off spending it on something new.”

Stubborn as ever, Sasha shook her head. “I can fix the caravan.”

“Every time I take money for that thing I feel like I’m robbing you,” Janey insisted. “Let me build you something new—”

Sasha held her chin high as she tugged the handkerchief at her neck. “I don’t have the money for something new. So.” 

Though her closed-off tone left little room for debate, it was less effective at hiding the embarrassment hiding underneath. Fiona knew it well.

Something jabbed her in the ribs. She looked over to see Vaughn nudging her expectantly.

“She needs money,” he offered pointedly, when Fiona still hadn’t said anything.

Sasha caught on first. “Absolutely not. I don’t want anything from her.” 

Fiona laughed. “Convenient that I hadn’t offered, then.”

Vaughn’s stance changed from hopeful to annoyed. “Oh, come on, this is so stupid—”

“No,” Sasha insisted. “I don’t want to be in your debt.”

“Fine by me,” Fiona shot back. “I’ve got better things to spend it on—”

Sasha raised an eyebrow at Fiona’s new clothes and snorted.

“—and I’m sick of bailing you out anyway.”

Athena and Janey exchanged uncomfortable glances, while Vaughn groaned and put his head in his hands. 

Sasha’s eyes had narrowed fiercely. “Bailing me out? When the hell is the last time you bailed me out?”

“You would have _died_ if I hadn’t carried that goddamn watch around for a year because you were too fucking stubborn to accept a gift.”

“A gift?” Sasha shook her head. “That was a bribe to forget about all the shit he’d done, same as that nine million, same as any money you’d give me for a new caravan. Don’t apologize, don’t try to understand me, just throw something shiny at the problem until I get over it.”

Fiona folded her arms. “You know, I hoped you’d grow out of it some day, but you are still unbelievably ungrateful.”

“ _Ungrateful_?” Sasha spluttered. “Are you kidding me?” 

“You never appreciated anything Felix and I did for you.”

“Oookay,” interrupted Janey, her cheer increasingly strained, “really thinking we could all use that drink, right? How about—”

Both sisters ignored her, glares fixed on each other. 

“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Sasha, the apology doused with a lethal amount of sarcasm. “Which thank-you card are you still waiting on? ‘Thanks for lying to me’? ‘Thanks for making sure I always knew who the better daughter was’?”

“Your persecution complex is not my problem.” Everything on the tip of Fiona’s tongue came tumbling out before she could stop it. “God, you make it sound like I ever wanted to be stuck taking care of you. You have no idea what a tough, thankless job it was. You finally wanna look after yourself? Be my guest. I’ve been waiting my whole life.” 

A muscle in Sasha’s jaw clenched, and her lips pressed together in a thin line. In the pause that followed, Fiona’s heart pounded in her own ears.

“Guess the vault gave you what you wanted after all,” said Sasha finally, eerily calm as her anger vanished beneath a wall of ice so thick even Fiona caught the chill of it. She twisted her head to look at the others, courteous and remote. “I’ll be staying at the Purple Skag for a few days. Janey, if I can figure out which parts I need…”

“Right, yeah,” said Janey, too quick to be casual. “Uh, just give me a holler.”

“Thanks.” Sasha tipped her chin in acknowledgment. “If any of you want that drink, it’s cheap night at the Skag—though I guess that’s basically every night.” She slunk towards the door without even a passing glance at her sister. “See you later.” 

Fiona didn’t need explicit instruction to know the invite didn’t extend to her. “Please, no one wants that watered-down—”

“Wait up, Sasha. I’m coming.” Vaughn followed after her, walking backwards to look back at his hosts. “Janey, Athena—back in a bit.”

Sasha gave them all a curt two-finger wave, but Vaughn paused just long enough to shake his head pointedly at Fiona. She gawped as the door swung shut. 

“Rude,” she muttered. But when she turned around, Janey’s forced smile had disappeared, and Athena was watching her with narrowed eyes.

“What the hell was that?” Athena barked, instantly transformed back into the imposing figure who had once chased Fiona through the streets of Hollow Point.

“Sorry about that,” said Fiona, brushing back her hair, “she’s always been a bit of a drama—”

“Not Sasha. You.” Athena took a step forward, the look on her face intense enough to raise Fiona’s eyebrows.

“Me? I didn’t do anything, she’s got a chip on her shoulder because she thinks I hatched some grand plan to seek fame and fortune without her—”

“You did leave without her.” 

“Not on purpose!”

“It doesn’t matter if it was on purpose. It still happened.” Athena’s gaze was uncompromising. “You have to fix it.”

Fiona rolled her eyes. “Right, so it’s all on me, of course.”

“Yes.” Athena spoke plainly, steady but unyielding. “You’re the one who made the mistake. You fix it.”

Whatever anger of Fiona’s had been tempered by Sasha’s departure was quickly stoked ablaze again. The nerve of them, every one of them, treating her like some backstabbing mastermind, some colossal fuck-up responsible not only for mistakes, but for other people’s misunderstandings and worst assumptions—

Her lip curled. “Sorry, Athena, but you’re not really the first person I’d go to for relationship advice. The only reason you even got engaged is because I lied to her for you, because you were too much of a coward to—holy—”

Athena moved faster than Fiona could’ve anticipated; one second, she’d been standing feet away, and the next, she’d slammed Fiona back into the wall, eyes blazing. 

“—shit,” finished Fiona, around the same time Janey shouted, “Athena!”

Athena didn’t react to either voice, or to Janey’s hand on her shoulder. She pressed her forearm across the top of Fiona’s chest, pinning her in place. Age might have softened the lines on her face, but it hadn’t dulled her strength. 

Stunned and smarting, Fiona only gawped at her.

“I would give anything for the chance to see my sister again,” Athena snapped. “To apologize. To right the wrong I did to her.” The pressure from her forearm increased, and Fiona swallowed. “But I can’t. She’s dead.” Her face was inches away, and there was nothing gentle about it now. “Sasha’s not. Yet.” She leaned closer, her voice as hard as the look in her eyes. “You fucked up. Fix it. Coward.”

With that, she let go, backing away to the opposite wall, her intense eyes still fixed on Fiona. Unaware she was even being held up, Fiona slid an inch down the wall, rubbing at the sore spot on her collarbone and avoiding two pairs of eyes.

“Wow, okay,” she tried to joke. “Thanks for the gentle encouragement.”

“I’m serious,” said Athena.

Fiona snorted. “No kidding. Think you made your point when you bruised my sternum.”

“You’re still not listening—” 

“Okay,” said Janey, who’d found her way between the two of them, “time out. Fiona, maybe you should—”

“Let me guess, go grovel for forgiveness? Write 'I will not touch Eridian artifacts' a hundred times?”

“—give us some space,” Janey finished, colder than she’d started. 

Athena stood, unyielding, with Janey at her side like a disappointed teacher. Fiona rolled her eyes, straightened her jacket and adjusted her collar.

“Fine,” she told them both. “I know how to look after myself in Hollow Point.”

* * *

The water pressure at the Purple Skag was barely above a light drizzle, but after a few days on the road, it felt like a luxury spa to Rhys. 

When asked about the possibility of a shower, August had glared, grumbled “don’t use all the hot water”, and then pointed Rhys to a bathroom that made him long for the questionable communal showers of his first college dorm. 

Skipping the reunion with Janey and Athena had been something of a controversial choice. Sasha had frowned deeply and asked if he was sure, like a parent hesitantly leaving their child without a babysitter for the first time; Rhys wasn’t sure if she was concerned for his safety, or worried he’d burn the house down. Still, ducked beneath the showerhead, feeling the layer of dust and grime on his skin wash away drip by drip, Rhys knew it was the best decision he’d made in… well, in a depressingly long time, come to think of it. 

Which he definitely didn’t want to. 

He turned around, tipped his head back and tried to rinse every pesky grain of sand from his hair instead. If he focused on the immediate present, things weren’t so bad. There was hot water. He was safe, or safe enough. As far as he knew, there wasn’t even anyone left who particularly wanted to kill him. He had a place to sleep for the night. And then…

And then what? He couldn’t stay at the Purple Skag forever. He didn’t have money, and August certainly didn’t want him around. In a couple days Sasha would fix her caravan, and then she’d be off on her own again, like she’d wanted from the start. Helios was out of the question; even if he could learn to withstand all its ghosts, it wasn’t fair to shackle himself to Vaughn when Vaughn thrived in his absence. Wherever Fiona was, she’d made it clear Rhys wasn’t welcome. 

Atlas was gone, nothing left but memories of infection and loneliness and long nights working towards a dream that had never been viable. 

“Don’t think about it,” he muttered, eyes squeezed shut as he leaned his forehead on the cracked shower tile. “Don’t think about it, don’t think about it, and…” He sighed. “And stop talking to yourself.” 

Since he was twelve years old, Rhys had known what he wanted to do. For as long as he could remember, he’d had goals, and detailed step-by-step plans to achieve them. What grades he needed, in what subjects. The university to attend. The job application. The prosthetics to get, the backs to stab, the promotions to shoot for. Even after Helios, when everything was in pieces—including his body—Atlas was a carrot on a stick, the distant point of light from the far end of the tunnel. 

Now the tunnel had caved in. He had no plan, no pinprick of light to claw his way towards. Forget the carrot—he didn’t even have a stick. 

_You’re pathetic, kiddo._

Icy panic twisted in his chest. Rhys shivered, suddenly aware that the water had turned cold and his skin was covered in goosebumps. He rinsed off the last of the soap as quick as he could, shut off the water, and wrapped himself in a threadbare towel. He dripped on the linoleum, struggling to think with a brain preoccupied by screeching white noise. Showering was precisely as far as his future planning currently extended. 

Now what?

Ignoring the existential quandary and the frantic beat of his heart, he focused on the immediate, toweling off and reaching for his clothes. Only once he’d hit the necessary step of styling his hair did he bother to wipe the fog from the tiny broken mirror. 

_Jeeze, cupcake, you look like shit._

The Rhys staring back at him through the glass was not unlike the shadow that had followed him around Atlas for months, caught in windows and blackened screens and other shiny surfaces. The lingering moisture from the shower didn’t mask the bags under his eyes, the faint sunburn, or the way his once-pristine clothes badly needed an iron.

_You gonna job hunt looking like something a skag coughed up? Hell, maybe that’s the vibe they look for down here, who knows. Maybe someone on Pandora’s in the market for a washed-up wannabe with defunct tech in his brain._

Though he was standing still, his heart pounded like it was trying to break free. Rhys looked away from the mirror, staring at a chip on the porcelain sink and willing his pulse to slow down.

_Y’know, it’s kind of funny, when you think about it. All those things you did… crashed a space station, killed all your coworkers, stuck a piece of glass in your goddamn eye… and for what? So you could grill mystery meat in some crapsack town for a two dollar wage?_

He gripped the edge of the sink hard, jaw clenching against the swell of nausea rising in his stomach. The small bathroom of the Purple Skag felt claustrophobic. 

_Should’ve let me finish you off then and there._ Phantom fingers tickled the base of his neck. _It would’ve been so easy…_

Rhys jerked away from the sink, stumbling into the opposite wall. His left arm flew to his throat instinctively, rubbing it as though to soothe away the sudden tightness making it difficult to breathe. In the crooked mirror, he caught another glimpse of his reflection, wide-eyed and terrified and pitiful.

In the silence of the bathroom, imagining cruel laughter was too easy. With shaking fingers, he pulled open the door and set off to find August.

* * *

Sasha stomped away from Janey’s place with her fingers making impatient grabs at the open air, like she might get lucky and find an invisible stress ball. 

In thirty-seven years, Sasha’d had her share of bad days—more than her share, some would argue. The longer she lived, the harder it became for anything to crack the top ten. 

This day was giving it a good run, though.

Arguing with Rhys. Totalling the caravan. Running into—and fighting with—her sister, again. Having to beg help off of August. Getting marooned in bloody Hollow Point. Rhys pulling away, bit by bit. 

Her fingers curled into her palms. That last part was good, she reminded herself. Inevitable. Needed to happen.

“Sasha!” Vaughn was almost breathless as he tried to keep step next to her. “Sorry about that. She’s been an asshole all day, if it makes you feel better. ”

“I don’t want to talk about her.”

“I guess she’s… uh… let’s say ‘adjusting’.” He mimed quotation marks in the air. “She took me to this casino-slash-bar-slash-nightmare, and I know I’m usually like ‘oh, give her a chance’, but—”

Sasha ground her teeth together. “I said I don’t want to talk about her.”

“Right, right, yeah, sorry.” He shrugged. “But, for the record? Kinda starting to think you were right to cut her out.”

Sasha said nothing, glaring at the cobblestone that made up the roads in this part of town. Visiting Hollow Point was always a mistake. She hated the dampness in the air, the flat darkness of the cave ceiling, the way time lurched along at an invisible, monotonous pace, unmarked by sun or stars or weather. How did she keep getting stuck here? What kind of curse had this place put on her when she was a child? 

“Sorry to hear about the caravan,” he continued, when she hadn’t spoken. “If you need to borrow a vehicle for a while—”

“No. I don’t need any charity and I don’t want any debt.”

He rolled his eyes. “It’s not charity, Sasha. Friends help each other for free.”

“I can take care of myself,” she insisted, eager to end the conversation before it could blaze out of control. “I’m not interested in being anyone’s burden. I haven’t asked any of you for help, so stop trying to give it to me. Okay?” 

Vaughn might have wanted to argue, but he settled for muttering, “Stubbornness is genetic, huh?” 

She glared. “Excuse me?”

“Nothing,” he said quickly. Vaughn never held his ground around her. Sometimes Sasha wished he would. “So…” He tried and failed to sound casual. “Where’s Rhys?”

“Left him with the caravan. Someone’s gotta defend it from bandits.”

“You what?!” 

Sasha snickered. “I’m kidding. He stayed behind at the Purple Skag.” She tossed her braids over her shoulder. “Don’t think he was feeling up to another reunion.”

“Should’ve guessed.” All traces of Vaughn’s concern were immediately replaced by annoyance. “Avoiding people is his new thing, so that checks out.”

“He thinks you’re mad at him.”

“I am mad at him!” Vaughn’s hands swung out in front of him to emphasize the point. “Do you know how much I’ve put up with for him? _From_ him? How many hangovers and bad breakups and elective surgeries? I joined Hyperion because of him! I came to Pandora in the first place because he didn’t get his stupid promotion. He can’t put up with a few awkward stares in the hallway after he’s been gone for a decade?”

A strange feeling of defensiveness unearthed itself in Sasha. She swatted it down. “Thought friends helped each other for free.”

Vaughn’s arms sagged mid-gesture. “That’s… uh… I didn’t mean it like that.” With a deflated sigh, he dropped his arms completely. “He was gone for twelve years. I’ve missed him. And he just…” 

“I know,” she said calmly. “I’m not saying he was in the right, I’m just saying he’s…” 

A wreck. Lost. Panicking. Coming apart at the neatly-stitched seams. 

“...still finding his footing,” she finished. “He misses you too.”

Vaughn barked a bitter laugh. “Oh, right, sure. Then why’d he leave?”

Recognizing a fight that wasn’t hers to have, Sasha shook her head. “You’d have to ask him.”

Vaughn kicked a pebble so that it skittered down the road in front of them, a tiny clatter against an awkward silence. 

Street by street, Athena and Janey’s nicer neighborhood gave way to a seedier part of town, cobblestone fading to dirt. Sasha’s eyes darted around as they walked. Perhaps the dangers of Hollow Point should have felt more familiar, and therefore less alarming, than the similar threats lurking elsewhere on Pandora. 

Instead, the effect was the opposite. Sasha knew all too well what every corner might hide. When electricity was scarce, rolling power outages were common, plunging quadrants of the city into pitch blackness. Though it had been years since her face had been splashed across any wanted signs, old habits were hard to break. 

“Nice to see you out of Helios,” she said, making conversation as her attention lingered on shadows. “I’d started to think that was impossible.”

“It was Fiona’s idea,” he said flatly. “She insisted it’d be good for me.”

Sasha wrinkled her nose, choosing to hold her tongue rather than agree with Fiona on anything. 

“It’s been almost a day,” Vaughn continued, fretting now. “No one’s called me. That’s probably good, right? That probably means they’re not dying.” He paused. “Or they all died, and that’s why no one’s called me. Because they’re all dead.”

Sasha rolled her eyes. “I’m sure no one’s dead.” The impatience gave way to a frown, and she looked at him. “You used to leave Helios all the time.”

“That was different. Yvette—”

“No, no,” said Sasha, shaking her head, “you stopped venturing out long before she left. It’s like something spooked you.”

The look on Vaughn’s face was withering. “Gee, what could it have been?”

Sasha’s cheeks flushed, but she stopped herself from reaching for her handkerchief. “That was an accident. I ran out of ammo.” 

“Yeah, so you said.” Though he sounded resentful, he didn’t press. “Man… this sucks.” He sighed, shoulders rounding forward as he slouched. “Is this what you thought it’d be like if they came back?”

In the early days after their disappearance, Sasha had thought of little else. It had been the subject of every dream, every wayward fantasy, every fleeting thought when she turned a new corner. She’d imagined hugs and tears and relief so intense it would make her dizzy. 

Then they’d found Felix. 

“I don’t know,” she told Vaughn. “I didn’t think they were coming back.”

* * *

Having only been to the Purple Skag once before, Rhys had no point of comparison for how the intervening years might have changed it.

He appreciated that. It was nice to be somewhere that still held an illusion of familiarity. Still, he found himself lingering at the bottom of the stairs. There was no one at the bar itself except August, wiping down the counter with a rag. 

August would not have been Rhys’ first choice for companion, given the circumstances—given any circumstances, really, except maybe a bar fight. He was certain August felt the same. 

Ignoring that his out-of-control heart rate and persistent nausea, Rhys walked over to the bar like he was heading to a performance review, shoulders back and head held high in an easy simulation of confidence. August raised his head as Rhys approached, managing to make apathy feel hostile.

“Took you forever,” he commented. “Was starting to wonder if you’d drowned.”

Annoyance chipped away at Rhys’ lingering panic. Maybe August was the right person to talk to after all.

“Sorry to disappoint,” he deadpanned, sliding onto a bar stool. “So…” He cast a glance around the bar. A few patrons were playing a card game in a corner. Someone had fallen asleep on the table next to their full beer. The place was mostly empty. “Business looks… good…”

August narrowed his eyes. “It’s off-peak hours, all right?” 

“...Right,” said Rhys.

The person who’d fallen asleep started to snore.

“Sasha tells me you’re looking for a job.” August said it so casually Rhys couldn’t tell if he’d intended to twist the knife or not.

Not about to let his feathers be ruffled in either case, Rhys smiled. “Why, you hiring?” 

“No,” said August; Rhys snorted. “Do you even know how to bartend?”

“Technically no, but I did go to college.”

August lifted his hands in mock reverence. “Oh, well, excuse me. Forgot I was speaking to high society.”

“Wha…?” Rhys shook his head. “No, that’s not—I just—I meant I used to drink a lot. In college. You know?”

“Nope.” August folded his arms. “Never went to college.”

“Okay, well—”

“Drinking a lot’s not a qualification,” August continued.

“I _know_ , it was a joke. Jeeze.” Rhys rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Surprising you don’t have more regulars coming here for your companionable chatter.”

“Maybe they like the quiet. Some people like to be left alone with their thoughts.”

Rhys knew at least one patron who very much did not want to be left alone with his thoughts, but he wasn’t about to tell August that. “...Right.” 

The front door to the bar creaked as it swung open. Rhys twisted on his chair to watch someone lumber in, so tall they had to stoop under the doorframe.

“Sasha won’t be back for a while,” said August, jolting into Rhys’ thoughts before the disappointment had even coalesced into something tangible. “Janey lives in the nice part of town. It’s a walk. Especially if they went to see the caravan.” 

August wiped a spot near Rhys’ elbow with prejudice, then slipped to the other side of the counter, leaving Rhys on his own. 

The prospect of several hours alone at the Purple Skag with August was not Rhys’ favourite, but he had to stop thinking of Sasha like a security blanket. She’d only brought him along in the first place out of pity; she’d said it herself, once she thought he couldn’t hear. 

_Duh. What’d you expect her to say, dumb-dumb? Loooove?_

Rhys scrubbed at his eyes with his index and forefingers, a gesture he hoped might be the hard reset his brain needed. Despite everything the universe had thrown at her, Sasha was too good-hearted to leave a pitiful stray by the side of the road. God only knew how long she’d let him leech off of her, if she thought he still needed to. 

He had to show her that he didn’t, so she could move on with a clean conscience. Even if the thought of finding his way without her—or Vaughn, or Fiona—made him want to throw up all over August’s nice clean countertop.

Running low on options, Rhys decided to do what everyone else in the Purple Skag was doing. His meagre amount of cash wouldn’t go far—wouldn’t have, even twelve years ago, when he’d taken it with him to go “meet Fiona” and instead wound up getting clobbered in the head by Loader Bot. It certainly wasn’t enough to live off of, or even enough to act as seed money for whatever vague future he was about to lumber into. 

But it was enough to buy a few drinks. At the moment, Rhys could think of no better cause to throw money at than slowly losing coherent thought.

“So, what’s a drink cost these days?” he asked, experimentally thumbing through a few bills as August returned to his post behind the bar. “It’s, uh, been a while.” 

Maybe there’d been a spike in inflation. Or maybe Pandora had given up money all together and now operated on a bartering system of skag bones, or something equally grim. 

August made a noise like the world’s most long-suffering man. “You’re on Sasha’s tab.”

The short-lived thrill in Rhys’ chest was quickly engulfed by guilt. Sasha’s disposable income was limited and he’d never done anything to earn his keep. Couldn’t even fix her radio.

_Oh, come on, kid, you never gave someone a bit of go-away money?_

“She didn’t have to do that,” said Rhys quietly, staring at his useless handful of cash. 

“No, she didn’t,” August agreed. “But she’d kick my ass if I took that from you.” 

“I won’t tell if you won’t.”

August considered it, but then he shook his head. “Nah. You keep it.” He slung the rag over his shoulder and reached to fill a pint glass. “But I’m giving you the cheap stuff.”

Resigned to defeat, Rhys put the cash away. “As long as it’s alcoholic, I don’t really care.” 

August slid him a glass of something that looked approximately like beer. With an appreciative tip of his chin, Rhys gulped down a swig of his drink. 

Then he choked and coughed until his eyes watered. 

“Oh my god,” he managed, once he could speak again. “I thought this was the cheap stuff!”

“Thought you’d be able to hold your liquor, Honour Roll.”

“Hey, in college ‘the cheap stuff’ was shitty watered-down beer, all right? Not acetone.” 

“I said cheap, not weak. I don’t sell anything weak,” said August. “But good taste’ll cost you.” 

The corner of his mouth twitched up for the first time, which by August standards probably counted as hysterical laughter. Rhys shook his head, but since he was in no mood to pay for something better—or stay sober—he wrinkled his nose and managed a second, much smaller sip. It burned the back of his throat and tasted just as awful as it had the first time, but at least it’d be strong enough to get the job done quickly.

Low-cost drinking in a dive bar. College indeed.

“Thanks, by the way,” he said, some time after the third sip had started to settle in his bones. “For all this. I know I’m probably not your favourite person to have around.” He wiped a line in the condensation on his glass. “I won’t stick around long. Promise.”

Drying clean glasses and stacking them artfully on the shelf behind the bar, August shrugged. “Not doing it for you.”

Ah. Twelve years in, and Sasha asking was all the convincing August needed.

“I figured,” Rhys admitted. Wary of the jealousy he could feel lurching like a zombie through his conscious, he offered, “It’s nice that you and Sasha are still close.” 

“We aren’t. Not really.” August kept his back to Rhys as he arranged and rearranged the glasses. “Gave it a go for a few years, but Sasha won’t let anyone in. Usually.”

“Huh?” Preoccupied with tracing shapes on the side of his cup and working on a buzz, Rhys took an extra second to notice the weight of the word or August’s pointed stare. “Uh, yeah, about that: think you’re misinterpreting my relationship with Sasha.” 

August glared at him. “Don’t play dumb.”

“I’m not,” said Rhys, narrowing his eyes in return. “She feels sorry for me, maybe a little nostalgic. That’s all.” Saying it out loud twisted his heart in his chest, and he tightened his grip on the pint glass. “So you can drop the jealousy, okay? She’s not interested. Trust me.” 

Then he tossed back a large gulp of his drink.

August watched him for an uncomfortably long time, most of which Rhys spent scowling at the rim of his glass, bitter he’d had to have the conversation at all, wishing August’s shitty alcohol would hurry up and dull things faster. The universe had become creative in its cruelty. 

After what felt like a long deliberation, August turned, folding his arms and leaning back against the counter with a deadly serious expression.

“You shouldn’t have come back,” he said. 

Rhys’ head snapped up and his voice rose to an incredulous high. “Excuse me?” 

“You heard me,” said August. “You two really fucked things up for Sasha and Vaughn when you disappeared.”

“Gee, keen observation, detective,” Rhys snapped. “You think I meant for this to happen? Everything I had, or planned, or wanted—the vault took all of it.” His voice shook. “I’ve got nothing left.”

August was unmoved and unsympathetic. “Nothing. Right. Just a friend going out of her way to make sure your sorry ass is taken care of.”

“Because she thinks I’m pathetic! You heard her too—she can’t wait to be rid of me, she’s just too nice to say it to my face.”

None of that registered with August, whose eyes narrowed. “Years I watched her and Vaughn turn themselves inside out ‘cause of you two. Years! Now, just when they’re finally moving on, you two come back—and you’ve got the nerve to sit here with your free drink complaining about how hard it is for _you_?” 

“I’m not saying—”

“Used to think I must be misremembering. Gotta be something I missed that got two good people so hung up on you, right?” August braced both hands on the bar counter, looming overhead. “But no. You’re still the liar who was too selfish and cowardly to warn anyone he’d let Handsome Jack into his head.”

Guilt stood no chance against the mix of alcohol and anger already flowing through Rhys’ veins. “Oh, fuck you, mama’s boy.”

“Sasha’d be out of here by now if it weren’t for you two.”

It was a ridiculous statement, so Rhys scoffed. 

“She would be.” August was firm. “Got an offer from your Hyperion friend.” 

“Yvette?” he croaked in disbelief. That couldn’t be right. Yvette had gone home. There was no way Sasha would turn down a chance to escape Pandora—

“Yeah. Hooked herself up with a ride off Pandora and was looking for company. Vaughn wouldn’t budge, so she asked Sasha. Sasha turned her down too.” 

Rhys shook his head. “No, that’s—that doesn’t—Sasha wouldn’t—”

“She would,” August insisted. “She did.” 

It was hard to organize words in the deafening buzz of Rhys’ brain. “Why?”

August’s stare was cold and hard. “Why do you think?” 

Rhys was having difficulty thinking much of anything. He couldn’t make sense of Sasha being handed her golden ticket yet turning down her visit to the chocolate factory. 

“You really wanna repay Sasha?” August continued. “Leave her alone and let her move on before you screw it up again.” 

Rhys’ mouth dropped open, but no sound came out. He wanted to defend himself, but no words were coming to mind to do it. 

Then their stare-down was interrupted by a crash, as one poker-playing customer threw another into an empty table.

“Ugh.” August had the tone of someone whose annoyance should not be confused with surprise. “Hey! Douchebags!” He ducked through the trap door to the bar. “You break that table, you owe me a new one!”

Rhys watched him confront the customers in a daze. His head spun like he’d had far more than a few sips of whatever sludge August had served him. On legs that felt longer and looser than normal, he slipped off the bar stool and stumbled out the back door.

* * *

The back alleys of Hollow Point felt surreal, like a thin film separated Rhys from the world around him. Maybe it was the alcohol. Maybe it was the culmination of twelve intervening years, an invisible barrier he couldn’t break through. 

Anxiety clawed at the inside of his ribcage. Fiona was right: his mistakes were contagious. August was right: he shouldn’t have come back. All he’d done was dig up scar tissue for Sasha and Vaughn, scars he’d help make in the first place. 

Jack was right. It would have been better for everyone if he’d just…

_Easy solution to that problem, Rhysie. No time like the present, am I right?_

“Shut up, shut up, shut _up_!” Rhys burst out. His own voice echoed back at him against the brick walls of the empty alley. 

So he was sober enough to hear ghosts, and drunk enough to talk back to them. 

Great. 

He picked up speed as he rounded another corner, wandering with no destination in mind except “away”, as though it were possible to put enough physical distance between himself and the thoughts nipping at his heels. He nearly walked into the rough stone of the cave wall before he realized he’d hit a dead end. 

Then the street lights went out, and everything around him plunged into darkness. The ambient hum of electricity gave way to eerie silence—for a second, anyway, before it was broken by a psycho a few streets over shouting something incomprehensible and few rounds of gunfire. Business as usual, then.

The night vision of his cybernetic eye clicked to life on command, a small mercy Rhys was in no mood to properly appreciate. He walked to the end of the alley and looked both ways. Another short dead end to his right. Back where he’d come from, to the left, there was a man standing in the middle of the alley, frozen and tense. He must not have been able to see anything at all.

Rhys considered his options. The man was in the way, but Rhys might be able to slip past him if he just—

“Fucking blackouts,” the man muttered. Then, by chance, he turned to face Rhys, and his eyes widened. “What the hell is that?”

For a moment, they stared at each other in mutual confusion; then, in the time it took Rhys to imagine what it would be like to see a single glowing eye six feet off the ground, the man had pulled out a gun and aimed it square at Rhys’ chest.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, easy!” said Rhys quickly, staggering back a step, both hands raised. “It’s just my eye. See?” He turned on his palm light too, illuminating his own face and hopefully-non-threatening smile. “It’s cybernetic. Lights up when I use it.”

The man’s face turned from fear to suspicion to intrigue in quick succession, his thick brow furrowing. 

“Fancy,” he commented, eyeing Rhys’ arm, before he focused on the eye again. “You can see in the dark with that thing?”

Rhys could, very well. Specifically, he could see the muzzle of the gun still pointed in his direction, which was very distracting. “Uh… yeah.” 

The man took a step forward; Rhys compensated with a step back. 

“Sounds useful,” said the man.

“Yeah, I mean, it… comes in handy…” said Rhys, offering another friendly shrug.

“Been a lotta blackouts around here lately,” the man told him, still advancing while Rhys retreated. “Sure could use something like that myself.”

Deciding that he liked having the advantage of sight, Rhys shut off the light from his palm. “Well, you know, they’re handy, sure, but then you have to keep them upgraded, and let me tell you, the installation process is not pleasant, and… and what are you doing?”

The man had pulled out a knife, adjusting his grip on the gun to hold both weapons at once. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Right,” said Rhys, who was in fact very worried about it. Backing away steadily now, he stumbled over one of the many cardboard boxes lining the street. “Look, I’d love to help, but I, uh—don’t have any spares on me, at the moment, unfortunately, and I’ve kind of been… out of town… for a while, so I’m not really up-to-date on the best manufacturers…” 

“Oh, no,” said the man. “You’ve been _plenty_ helpful.”

“Great,” Rhys squeaked. “Glad to hear it.” He squared his shoulders, trying to look as tall and confident as he could for a foe that could barely see him, before taking a cautious step forward and around the man. “I’ll, um, just be on my way, then—”

“Not quite yet,” said the man. He jabbed the muzzle of his gun forward until it poked just above Rhys’ belly-button. When Rhys froze, the man gave him a wide, toothy grin. “Don’t worry. If you hold still, I’ll let you keep the other one.”

Fight-or-flight response kicking in, Rhys scrambled backwards. He made it three steps before his heel caught on another box and slid out from under him, sending him crashing to the ground and landing flat on his back. 

Fuck.

The man approached slow but steady in the dark, gun still pointed in Rhys’ direction. Rhys’ mind raced to catch up, fumbling its way through alcoholic fog. His cybernetic eye offered a nice, glowing target—but if he turned it off, he wouldn’t be able to see anything either. Crawling backwards, he cast wild looks around the alley, searching for something to use and finding only dumpsters and cardboard boxes. Maybe if he turned off his eye and made a blind break for it—

“I wouldn’t run if I were you,” said the man, eerily prescient as he loomed overhead. The hand holding the knife pat the gun affectionately. “This thing’s got a pretty quick fire rate.”

Rhys’ mouth had gone dry, his heart telegraphing panic with every beat. His back hit the wall at the end of the alley.

“You really don’t wanna do this,” he told the man, voice far shakier than he would’ve liked. “It’s a super messy job, believe me. Lotta blood. Tons of wire.”

The man held his gun in one hand and twirled his knife in the other. “I ain’t squeamish.”

“It’s an outdated model,” Rhys carried on quickly. “Can’t even connect to the EchoNet anymore, it’s—it’s obsolete really—”

The man crouched down, pinning Rhys in place with a knee to his stomach, the knife—and the gun—now much closer to Rhys’ head than Rhys wanted. 

“Y-you should just get a pair of goggles,” Rhys continued. “Easier. Way less mess. N-no brain surgery required—”

The cold tip of the gun found the spot under Rhys’ chin, tilting his head up. “You keep talking, this job’s gonna be a lot messier than it needs to be.”

Trapped against the back wall, Rhys eyed the tip of the knife and choked down a whimper. On the list of terrible life experiences he’d done once and hoped to never do again, having his eye ripped out of its socket was right near the top, just behind accidental mass-murder. 

Of all the ways to die, hacked up by some freak in a back alley—

How Pandoran. He’d gone native. 

“Please,” he stammered, “please, I…”

_Now you’re just embarrassing yourself. Like anything in your sad blip of a life is worth begging for—_

“Shut up,” said the man, forcing Rhys’ attention back to the present threat, not the shadow of an old one. He pushed the gun against Rhys’ neck so hard it became difficult to breathe. “Your fancy hand. Turn it on so I can see better.”

Rhys didn’t move. The pressure of the gun against his throat wiped everything from his mind except screeching terror and—

_Ask him to give you the ol’ Sweeney Todd shave. Make sure he hits the jugular. Finish you off real quick. It’ll be painless, probably. Mostly. Who knows. Let’s find out._

The man rolled his eyes. He held the tip of the knife to Rhys’ cheekbone, just below his left eye. “Turn it on, or I just start jabbing wherever I want.”

_C’mon, pumpkin, what are you waiting for? What have you got left to lose, really?_

Trembling, Rhys turned on his palm light, illuminating them both. Maybe Jack was right. Maybe it’d be quick… 

BANG! 

At the sound of gunfire, the man slumped forward, his knife grazing Rhys’ cheek as he collapsed. Confused, and with a heart that felt like it might work itself to death any second, Rhys shoved the body away. 

The back of the man’s head was a grisly mess. Blood began to pool where he’d fallen. 

In a crescendo of fear, Rhys scrambled further into the corner, flattening himself against the wall. Both eyes wide, he turned his head toward the gunman and his jaw dropped. 

“F-Fiona?”

“Holy crap,” said Fiona, arm still raised as she tucked her derringer away. “That was close, huh?”

Gun hidden, she stretched down her hand; Rhys took it, letting himself be pulled onto unsteady feet and staggering away from the growing pool of blood. 

“Wh…” Rhys’ chest heaved as he caught his breath, stunned and confused and still reeling with adrenaline. “Where did you come from?”

She shrugged. “Was out for a walk. Thought I heard your voice when the lights went out.” She wrinkled her nose. “Then I heard this charmer.” She nudged the body’s foot with her shoe. “Sounded like you could use the assist.”

The laugh that bubbled out of Rhys’ chest bordered on hysterical. “You think?” 

“I was waiting for a clean shot,” she snapped, angry suddenly. “I couldn’t see you, and I wasn’t sure what he’d do if he knew he had company. He could’ve blown your head off. _I_ could’ve blown your head off. If you’d used your stupid personal flashlight sooner—”

“Okay, _okay_ , sorry! Jeeze!” He lifted his hands in surrender and then began to dust himself off. “I appreciate the help. Didn’t mean to hit a nerve.” 

Fiona’s mouth froze open, like she’d been about to argue—then she shut it again, and let her hands fall to her sides. 

“Don’t worry about it,” she said, an odd note of defeat in her voice. She grabbed his chrome hand by the wrist, positioning it like a flashlight so she could better see his face. “You all right?”

“Yeah,” said Rhys, which was three-quarters of a lie. He touched the scratch on his cheek and his fingers came away with a thin line of blood. “Just a scratch… and some heart palpitations.”

“What a douche,” Fiona concluded, turning Rhys’ hand again to shine the light on the body. “He was severely underestimating how difficult it is to scoop out someone’s eye. What was he gonna do with it, anyway? Use it like a contact lens?” She bent over. “He lied about the fire rate, by the way. This thing’s crap.” She kicked the gun aside. “Oooh, sweet knife, though.”

“Oh come on, really?” Rhys’ stomach lurched as he watched her wipe the blood— _his_ blood—off the blade using the dead man’s coat.

“What, you want it?” She held out the handle. “You could use a weapon.” 

“You’re disgusting,” he told her.

Fiona grinned as she straightened up and pocketed the knife.

Nose wrinkled, Rhys shook his head. “Okay, can we get away from the corpse of the guy who wanted to maim me now?”

“Sure.” She waved her arms in a flourished 'after you' gesture. “Light the way, Rudolph.”

Hand aloft, Rhys led them away from the dead body and the dead-end alleys, lost to the near-death buzz that Pandora handed out like candy. More intoxicating than the swill at the Purple Skag, it left his legs shaky and his head feeling like it was tethered to the rest of his body by a mere string.

“This place has had blackout problems for years,” Fiona started explaining. “Different bandit clans vie for control of the power station, and…” 

But his scattered brain let the words drift by without notice. Fiona kept in close step beside him, almost-but-not-quite touching, an anchoring presence in his periphery. Rhys matched his stride to hers, listening to the synchronized click of their boots on the dirt road. Whatever sick cosmic sense of humour kept tossing them together, he was grateful for it now. Step by step, panic relinquished its iron grip on his nervous system.

“...get fed up and form their own gang,” she was saying, “and they go to the power station and… hey, are you listening to me?” She nudged him with her elbow. “Rhys?”

“Huh? What about gangs?”

Fiona narrowed her eyes, but for once it seemed more concern than annoyance. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Peachy,” said Rhys, who felt like he was held together by two safety pins and some duct tape. 

“Right.” Her tone was full of skepticism. “So why are you alone getting mugged behind some dumpsters?”

The truth was uncomfortable, so Rhys shrugged it off. “August’s hospitality could use some work.” He looked at her, taking in her new outfit and her hatless head for the first time. “Where have you been? How did you end up in Hollow Point?” 

“Vaughn and I went on an excursion. When that—er—ended, we stopped by to visit Janey and Athena.” 

“Vaughn’s here?” It came out by accident, but when she raised an eyebrow, he cleared his throat. “That’s why Sasha and I are here, too, the caravan—”

“Hit a skag,” said Fiona, curt. “Yeah. Sasha said.”

She very carefully avoided his eyes, but Rhys saw her frown.

“Guessing you ran into her, then,” he prompted.

“Yup,” was all she said.

“Guessing it didn’t go well,” he reasoned.

“Well, you know. She’s still pissed.” Her shrug was too stiff to be casual, but she changed the subject before he could dwell. “What about you two? How’s the romantic getaway?” There was something amiss in Fiona’s teasing, a razor blade buried in the candy apple. Was that bitterness? Jealousy? “Cozying up in a broken caravan?” 

He twisted his illuminated hand so that the embarrassment on his face might be hidden in the dark. “We did kiss, actually! And then she regretted it immediately, told me it was a mistake and now we’re spending the night at her ex boyfriend’s house, so… could’ve gone better, actually.”

“...Oh.” Fiona’s voice sounded like a faceplant, all the humour sucked out along with whatever else had been lingering there. 

“Yeah. Strong contender for the worst first kiss I’ve ever had, and there’s been some doozies—one time in high school I gave a girl anaphylactic shock ‘cause she was allergic to peanuts.” His artificial grin went unreturned, so he let it fade and shrugged. “Sasha and I missed our chance, that’s all. Maybe we had a shot once, but… that was a long time ago now.” If he said it out loud often enough, maybe it would stop stinging. “It happens.”

“Not like this it doesn’t,” Fiona said, so bitter he was taken aback. “This is… this is…”

“Garbage?” Rhys suggested. “Nightmarish? Unrelentingly terrible? Cruel and unusual punishment?”

“All of the above.” 

“Maybe we’re dead,” Rhys posited. “Maybe we died in the vault, and now we’re in hell. That would make sense, right?”

Fiona narrowed her eyes. 

“Are you saying I’d go to hell?” But she only let him squirm for a second before she laughed. “Kidding. ‘Course I would.” 

“Oh, me too. Obviously.” 

They passed another block in silence, Fiona slipping into the lead to guide the way. A cowardly part of Rhys wanted to linger in the communal misery for as long as he could, skirting around everything the way Fiona did.

Instead, he asked, “How’s Vaughn?”

She seemed thoughtful as she looked back at him, like she was deciding how much honesty he could handle.

“Angry,” she settled on. “You ran away.”

She didn’t sound as judgmental as he’d expected. 

“I know. I panicked. But...” His right hand flagged, and he rubbed the back of his neck with his left hand. “Honestly it’s probably better if I stay away.”

Fiona scoffed. “Uh, pretty sure that’s not how he sees it.”

Rhys smiled weakly. “Vaughn’s never seen clearly when it comes to me—if he did, he wouldn’t have stuck with me so long.” Before she could protest, he added, “Look at everything he was able to do once I got out of his way.”

“Y’know, taking credit for getting out of the way is still taking credit. You’re still making it about you.” 

“I don’t mean it like that. It’s... I meant… ugh.” The alley darkened as he scrubbed at his face with both hands, frustrated that no one else could see the truth of it the way he could. “It’s like you said, right? My bad decisions have a lot of bystander casualties. I don’t want him caught in the crossfire anymore. I don’t wanna do that to any of you.” 

Fiona’s mouth opened and closed silently as she chewed on what she wanted to say. 

Eventually, she chose, “You shouldn’t listen to me.” Pushing her hair behind her ear, she looked away, down the dark road. “I lie for a living.” 

“Well, you were right about me.”

“No, I wasn’t, I was just doing what I always do: making it impossible for anyone to be my friend.” With her back to him, Fiona spread her arms in demonstration. 

Guilt flared up. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

She shrugged. “It’s true. I can sabotage relationships without even trying.” She spun to face him, hand pressed to her chest in a false boast. “Vaughn, Athena, you—I even got my sister to hate me, and I didn’t think that was possible.” 

Rhys’ frown deepened with each shake of his head. “Come on, none of us hate you.”

Fiona snorted. “You weren’t at Athena’s earlier.”

He rolled his eyes. “I don’t need to be, I know they don’t. Vaughn’s hated like two people in his whole life; one of ‘em was Vasquez, and the other is the guy who pantsed him in eighth grade gym class.”

She wasn’t convinced. “Sure—and he happens to believe I’m a selfish jackass who would leave him behind to die.” She kicked at one of the boxes as they passed. “A recurring theme, actually.” 

Rhys decided it was best to ignore that and choose another angle. 

“Sasha doesn’t hate you,” he tried, “you’re her sister. She loves you.” 

“Twelve years and nine million dollars ago she did.” The quiet way she spoke was unnerving, stripped of all the bluster and confidence he associated with Fiona. “Now I’m not so sure.”

“Just because she’s angry—”

“It’s not that she’s angry. Sasha’s been angry with me plenty of times, okay? This is different. _She’s_ different. I can remember the day she was born, and now...” She fidgeted with the cuffs of her new jacket. “My sister’s a stranger and it’s my fault.”

He understood where she was coming from, he really did. He knew how unsettled he felt around Vaughn. How strange it was, seeing someone who looked like his best friend obscured beneath an impenetrable wall of years. How horrible it felt, knowing you’d stolen something from them you could never give back. 

Still, he couldn’t help but think of Sasha, sleeping on the roof of her caravan so she could gaze at the stars and imagine a better life.

“She hasn’t changed as much as you think,” he said gently. “If you just talk to her—”

“I’ve tried. I only make it worse,” said Fiona, miserable. “That’s what I always do.” 

“But—”

“Rhys, stop.” She said it so firmly his eyebrows rose. “I know you’re trying to help, but this whole thing, with Sasha? It’s not your problem to solve. Just leave it alone.”

Rhys opened his mouth to argue. He badly wanted to help—wanted to feel like his continued existence had some net positive influence on someone, somewhere. 

But he supposed he couldn’t blame her, or Sasha. When was the last time his involvement had meant anything other than unmitigated disaster?

Defeated, he sighed. “Fine.” 

Fiona’s hard expression gave way to something near remorse, but she turned away before he could study it closer. “Thanks.”

They walked a minute in silence before he nudged Fiona with his elbow. “Just for the record, I don’t hate you either.” 

Fiona looked at him, scarred eyebrow arched in doubt. 

“I mean, yeah, sure, you make me crazy, but… honestly I kind of like that.” He paused. “...Most of the time.” 

Fiona stopped in her tracks, so abrupt he nearly bumped into her. She tilted her head, scrutinizing him with narrowed eyes. “Why do you keep doing that?”

“Doing what?” 

“Trying so hard.” She watched him like a puzzle to be solved. “Even after I told you to stop.” 

“I’m a glutton for punishment?” But she didn’t smile, so he sobered. “I don’t know, I like you. You’re my friend.” He shrugged, and adopted a self-deprecating grin. “Guess I keep hoping you’ll eventually feel the same.” 

Fiona stared at him in disbelief, jaw ajar. “Of course I do. Do you really not know that?” 

Rhys blinked; that wasn’t the reaction he’d expected. “I…”

Before he could answer, she raked both hands through her hair and started pacing on the spot. 

“Well, why would you?” For once, the frustration in her voice wasn’t directed at him. “What happened the other day, when we got back… I’m better at picking fights than being honest, so that’s what I did.” Her lip curled, a surprising level of inward anger. “You tried to help and instead you got caught in the blast radius of my emotional fallout. I’m sorry.”

Rhys struggled to remember if she’d ever said that to him before. “Fi, it’s okay.” He put on an encouraging smile. “Family fights, right?” 

She froze. She stared at him, the cogs behind her clever eyes turning, and Rhys felt a flash of panic. Maybe he shouldn’t have said that. Maybe he’d overstepped. Maybe—

Fiona launched forward and threw her arms around his shoulders, a hug so fierce it knocked him back a step. 

“Whoa,” said Rhys, regaining his balance on slightly bent knees. “Thought you saved hugging for near-death experiences. Are you sure we’re not dead?”

“Shut up,” she muttered. Her grip was tight, her nails biting through his shirt as she clung to him. “I keep fucking it up. I’m not good with people. Not when it’s real. I get scared and I push them away so when they leave I can pretend it was my choice, but it doesn’t work. I still...” 

Her breath hitched. Stunned, Rhys could think of nothing to do but wrap his arms around her in return. 

“I didn’t mean what I said, about taking the hint,” she continued. “I don’t want you to stop trying to be my friend. You’re the only one who still trusts me.” She buried her face in his shoulder, her muffled voice shaking. “I need you.”

That anyone wanted—no, _needed_ him around hit Rhys like a moonshot, and he felt like he’d chugged an entire keg of August’s disgusting liquor: light-headed, dazed, throat burning, unsure whether he ought to laugh or cry. He hadn’t known how much he needed to hear those words until Fiona said them. 

“I need you too,” he admitted. He pulled Fiona as close as he could. “I can’t do this by myself. I don’t wanna be alone again.” The truth came out raspy and desperate. “I don’t think I’d survive it.” 

Fiona gave him an extra squeeze. He was fairly certain he heard her sniffle, but it was lost in the sound of his own staccato breathing. They stood that way for a moment, two castaways reaching for the same life raft in the dark. 

Fiona pulled away first, ducking her head as she did so and swiping conspicuously at her cheeks. 

“Right,” she said, hands on her hips, suddenly decisive. “Gonna be honest, I have no idea where to go from here. But whatever it is...” Her smile was warm and genuine. “Do it together?”

Eyes damp, Rhys nodded as he returned the smile. “I was kinda hoping you’d say that.” 

With a sudden thrum, electricity returned to the street; the overhead street lights sparked back to life, as did the glow inside some of the nearby windows. Fiona yelped, squinting as her pupils adjusted, while Rhys clicked off his palm light and ECHO eye. 

“Forgot how annoying that is,” Fiona muttered. “So… where to next?”

Rhys considered it. “I should go back to the Purple Skag. I don’t want to disappear on Sasha.”

A sad shadow flickered over Fiona’s face, but she nodded. “Probably a good call.” She straightened her shoulders, ready for battle. “I should probably apologize to Vaughn and Athena.” She rubbed the back of her neck. “That’s… gonna be difficult.”

“Nah.” He nudged her shoulder. “Just be sincere.” 

She wrinkled her nose into a childish pout. “Ugh. Do I have to?” But she strode off down the alley and waved him on after her. “C’mon, I’ll walk you back.” She pointed one reprimanding finger back at him. “You really need to stop wandering around unarmed. I’m gonna find you something idiot-proof. How did you work at a weapons company for so long without learning anything about weapons?”

Rhys fell into step behind her, grinning even as she rambled on about his incompetence. The pinprick of light filtering through the rubble of the caved-in tunnel wasn’t much, but it shone like a beacon against the pitch black.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's possible -- maybe even likely -- the rating will need to be raised with the next chapter. I'm not sure how much, because I haven't written it yet and am not sure where it'll land in the grand scheme of things. 
> 
> Another shout-out to @AnnaLytic who read through a draft and noticed when I accidentally had a ghost Vaughn wandering around a scene he didn't belong in. 
> 
> Say hi on Tumblr: [@oodlyenough](https://oodlyenough.tumblr.com/)


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sasha finds out about Rhys' reconciliation with Fiona, and things between them hit a boiling point.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rhysha special edition, feat. the scene I had to bump from chapter 8 because chapter 8 was uhhh 10 fuckin k long already. 
> 
> As mentioned prior, you may notice I also upped the rating on the fic and added some tags in anticipation of the climax. Sorry about that; wasn't really sure how far things were gonna go until I got there.

They neared the Purple Skag in time to watch Vaughn walk out the front door.

“Guess he’s done with drinks,” Fiona mused aloud. “Or maybe he was just hoping to see you.”

But when she turned around, Rhys was frozen in the alley behind her, eyes fixed on Vaughn. Probably hadn’t heard a word she said.

Fiona poked him in the stomach hard enough to get his attention. “You could go talk to him.”

Rhys’ eyes widened in horror at the prospect and he shook his head. “N-no, I…” The half-formed excuse died on his tongue. “Not right now. Not yet.” 

_Can’t avoid him forever_ , Fiona almost said, but for once she had the good sense to shut her mouth. Rhys still looked a little pale. Nearly having his eye gouged out might be enough stress for one evening. 

“All right,” she said, “I’ll catch up with him, you go talk to Sasha. Once I’ve done the rounds I’m definitely going to need a twelve-hour nap, so I’ll check in with you tomorrow. We can figure it out from there.”

Rhys’ nod gained speed as he looked away from where Vaughn had been to focus on Fiona. “You sure you don’t want to see Sasha?”

Fiona’s stomach churned at the thought. “Yeah. I, uh.” She fiddled with her cuffs. “I don’t have a lot of practice apologizing. Figure I should start smaller and work my way up, y’know?”

Her smile was cavalier, but Rhys’ earnest, encouraging expression activated a deep-rooted instinct to joke, or deflect, or run away. How did he always do that?

“You’ll do fine,” he told her. “Just do what you did with me.” His grin turned wicked. “Hug him and start crying, it’ll work like a charm.”

Fiona glared, the urge to flee replaced with the urge to smack him. “Tell anyone about that and I’ll kick your ass.”

Cheerfully ignoring her scorn, he bumped her shoulder. “Aw, c’mon, it was sweet. It was a moment. Surely it felt good to finally—”

“Right, I’m going after Vaughn.” She left the alleyway with a shake of her head, ignoring the snicker she could hear behind her. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Try not to get murdered in the meantime, all right?”

“See you,” called Rhys. The sound of his footsteps faded in the direction of the Purple Skag, but they paused. “Hey, Fi.”

She turned to find him with a look on his face so serious that, for once, she felt no desire to poke fun at it. “Yeah?”

His mouth opened prematurely, long enough that Fiona found herself bracing for a speech, but all he wound up saying was, “Thank you.”

A simple phrase shouldn’t have had the effect that it did. She felt warm again, the way she had when they’d hugged, a way that reminded her of late nights in the old caravan, laughing over a meal with Sasha and Felix, plots and schemes and marks temporarily forgotten. 

She hadn’t felt that way in a long time. 

Throat thick, she said, “You’re welcome,” before she turned to catch up to Vaughn.

* * *

Sasha’s room at the Purple Skag was small, but after years in her caravan, it felt oversized. The carpet was peeling up at the corner, the sheets threadbare, the three-legged dresser wobbled at the slightest weight.

None of those things bothered Sasha. What bothered her was that the room, much like all of Hollow Point, felt like a shackle around her ankle, chaining her to a life she’d wanted to escape for as long as she could remember.

At least August had running water and a decent shower. 

As she towelled herself off and pulled up her pants, she mentally rifled through her short-term options. Drinks with Vaughn and August had dulled the edge, but now that she was alone, the future remained a rock in her shoe. She’d have another look at the caravan, try to diagnose it herself. If the parts were more than she could afford, she could bartend. Save up. If the caravan got stripped for scrap before she fixed it… 

Maybe she and Rhys could search the classifieds together.

Even in jest thinking of Rhys made her stomach clench. When she’d tried to invite him down for drinks with Vaughn, he hadn’t even answered her. It made sense; she’d hurt him that night on the rooftop, whether she’d meant to or not. For the first time since then—the first time since his poor decision to tag along with her in the first place—he had the opportunity to get some space away from her. 

Of course he’d taken it. She would have done the same. So she pushed him back into the quarantine zone in her mind, alongside Fiona and Felix and nine million other things it was best not to think about.

The knock on the door came before she was finished getting dressed. August, probably, stopping by to say goodnight. Maybe angling for a nightcap. 

Now there was an idea—a bad one, certainly, but things with August always started as a bad idea. It _would_ be a good stress reliever… 

“Just a sec!” she called.

She dropped the towel and considered the pile of clothes on her bed. With a mind for expediency, she slipped into her short tank-top and tossed the rest onto the wobbly dresser—no sense leaving them where they might get in the way.

Once she’d wrapped her wet hair in her towel and tied her handkerchief back around her neck, she pulled open the door and found—

Rhys.

Oh.

“Hi,” he said quickly, “I…” He trailed off momentarily as he took in the state of her outfit, eyes widening. “Sorry, I, uh, I didn’t—I was… uh...”

In another life, watching him get tongue-tied might have left her smug or flattered. As it was, her attention zeroed in not on the rosiness of his cheeks, but the red gash along his cheekbone.

“You’re bleeding!” She reached up but caught herself before her fingers made contact. “What the hell happened?”

“I am?” Rhys blinked at her, and then at last his brain caught up with the moment. “Oh! Yeah, that.” He brushed his fingers along the cut. “I, uh, got mugged. Can I come in?”

“Mugged?” Sasha repeated, even as she stepped aside. “When did you get mugged?”

“Like an hour ago?” He waved his hand like it was of minimal concern. 

Sasha’s jaw dropped. “August said you were in your room. I knocked. I thought…” 

“No, I went for a walk,” he explained, like that was a normal thing to do in Hollow Point when you were unarmed and ill-equipped for self defense. “There was a blackout. A guy got jealous and wanted my Echo eye.”

The scene unfolding in Sasha’s head became more absurd with every word Rhys said. “He wanted your _eye_?”

“I’m fine now,” he continued, which might have been a lie, but Sasha thought nothing of it, because what he said next drowned out everything: “Fiona saved me.”

Once again, Sasha’s train of thought derailed. This time a cold pit in her stomach accompanied it. 

“You were with Fiona?” She tried to keep her voice neutral, but it sounded brittle. 

“Not at first,” he explained. “She was out for a walk too, heard the commotion… came to the rescue.” He smiled, seemingly oblivious to the newfound tension in Sasha’s shoulders. “That’s um… that’s actually what I wanted to talk to you about.”

Hands on her hips, Sasha bristled. “What, she send _you_ to apologize for her?” Before he could answer, she shook her head. “No, wait, that’s right, Fiona doesn’t apologize. Never mind.” 

Rhys scratched the back of his neck, a conflicted look on his face that only served to make Sasha more irritated. 

“We got talking, and… she and I are kind of in the same boat, now, with all of this. You know, starting over, figuring out what’s next.” He shrugged, his gentle smile at odds with his words. “Feels like it’d be easier to muddle through it together. So that’s what we’re gonna do.” 

The pit in her stomach opened up like a sinkhole. “You’re telling me you and Fiona are… what, running away together?”

“Wouldn’t say ‘running away’, exactly.” His grin wavered, his laugh a little nervous. “That’s why I’m telling you. Didn’t wanna disappear.”

Wordless, Sasha stared at him, grappling with a fact she’d been doing her best to ignore. It’d been obvious on the caravan, obvious on the trip to Hollow Point, obvious when he’d chosen to stay with August rather than accompany her to Janey’s. 

He wanted to get away from her. 

Of course he did. He should; he needed to forge his own way forward, to figure out—just like she had—how to carve his own place in the brave new world he’d been thrown into.

Still... with _Fiona_? 

“I appreciate everything you’ve done,” he said, filling her silence. “I really do. You didn’t owe me anything, and you still helped out. But you don’t have to anymore! Fiona and I can be each other’s problem.” He finished with a cheesy grin. “You’re off the hook.”

“How considerate,” she said finally, voice clipped. Turning her back to him, she tugged the towel out of her hair. “Well. Good luck then.” 

She waited for the sound of the door, but Rhys didn’t move. 

“You’re angry,” he said. He sounded stunned.

“No I’m not.” She wrung the dampness from the end of her braids. “I spent the better part of twelve years believing the two of you took off with Felix’s money. At least now it’ll be true.”

“I thought you’d be happy,” he carried on, disbelieving. “I’m leaving you alone. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

The words dug into Sasha’s skin and burrowed there. What she wanted? Since when was that of consequence? Things rarely happened the way Sasha would have chosen. 

“What I want isn’t the point,” she said flatly. “Do what you like.” 

“Oh come on.” Rhys’ surprise mutated to an anger of its own. In three long strides he walked around her, back into her field of vision. “This is ridiculous. You wanted me to figure something out. You told me to leave—”

“Because you were miserable. And I’m not telling you to stay now. Go where you’ll be happy. Seriously.” She tossed her damp towel over the chair with enough momentum to make the chair wobble. “Word of advice, though, for travelling with my sister: always have an exit strategy. You never know when a con artist might cut and run.”

Something clicked for Rhys, his anger briefly overshadowed by hurt—but it was gone as quick as it’d come. He scowled. “Oh, right, I get it now—it’s not about me at all, it’s about Fiona.”

Sasha rolled her eyes. “Of course it’s about Fiona. After everything she did, you really thought I’d be happy about the two of you together?”

“We’re not _together_ , and she didn’t—”

“She left me!” Sasha burst out, louder than she’d intended. “Both of you did! Now you’re gonna do it again, and you want me to, what, congratulate you?” She shook her head. “No way.”

Rhys frowned. Underneath his frustration was what she hated most: pity. “No one’s trying to abandon you, Sasha.” He spread his arms. “We’re right here.”

It was hard to know which was worse: that he would say it at all, or that he honestly believed it. 

Disappointment eclipsed everything else, and she sighed. 

“Look, just… forget it, all right?” She rubbed her forehead with one hand, gesturing towards the door with the other. “Good luck. Bon voyage. Whatever you wanna hear.” 

But Rhys didn’t move. “This is so stupid. If you’d just talk to Fiona—”

“I’ve told you, stay out of it.”

He folded his arms. “No.”

The brazenness tripped her up. “I beg your pardon?”

“No, I won’t stay out of it anymore, okay? You’re both important to me and I’m sick of watching you do this to each other.”

“To each other? She’s—”

“—sorry. I know she sucks at saying it—believe me—but she is.” His stepped closer, voice like a bath she wanted to sink into, coaxing and warm. “Just give her a chance. You owe—”

“I don’t owe her anything,” Sasha snapped. Her hands trembled with everything that had been festering since Janey’s place. “She got nine million dollars for the misery of being my sister, that’s not adequate back-pay? I didn’t ask her to do any of it, you know. If she hated looking after me so much, she didn’t have to wait twenty-five years to leave.”

Undeterred, Rhys waited for her to finish, and then he said, “— _yourself_. You owe yourself a chance to be happy. Otherwise everything you went through, everything you gave up or built for yourself, everything you survived…” His gaze travelled to the handkerchief around her neck, and a self-conscious blush flooded Sasha’s cheeks. “What was it for? So you could spend the rest of your life scraping by? _Why?_ What’s the point?” 

She opened her mouth, but no sound came out. 

“I know she hurt you. We both did. It was a mistake, and an accident, and please believe me when I say I am _so sorry_ for the twelve years of pain and loneliness and heartache.” Though his tone was uncompromising, he implored her to listen with wide, gentle eyes. “I’ve done a hell of a lot of things I regret, but putting you and Vaughn through that…? Top of the list.” 

He stepped closer, his face like a bath she wanted to sink into, coaxing and warm. Unable to put words to the storm of thoughts swirling in her head, Sasha pressed her lips together and stayed silent, staring at the floor.

“You’re right to be angry. I would be too. But Fiona’s back now, and you two have a chance to work it out. Pushing her away like this...” He shook his head. “You’re just hurting yourself even more.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sasha grit out. How could he? He hadn’t lived with it for the last decade, hadn’t felt the weight of it like an anchor in his soul every day. 

But Rhys raised an eyebrow like he was accepting a challenge. “You could’ve been off Pandora by now, but you chose to stay.”

Her brow furrowed, her head snapping up to look him in the eyes again. “What?”

“You could’ve gone with Yvette—”

“Who told you that?”

“—but you didn’t. You stayed here, on Pandora, the planet you hate… because you wanted to be wrong. You couldn’t leave, not if there was even the tiniest chance Fiona might come home. Right?” When she didn’t answer, he prompted again. “I’m right, aren’t I?”

“That was… that was years ago.” Sasha’s voice shook along with her head. “There were… other things… and…” It wasn’t convincing, even to her own ears. She narrowed her eyes. “Anyway, I wasn’t wrong, was I? She did meet Felix. She did have the money. She—”

“—would have told you. You know she would have.”

“It doesn’t matter what she was going to do, she left!” Sasha felt as though she’d swallowed a hot coal. “You both did! And I had to…”

Grieve. Move on. Figure out how to survive. Convince herself it was worth it, without the two people she’d—

“Sasha.” Rhys’ fingers touched her bare shoulder, featherlight and gentle. “I know.” The lump in her throat burned. “It’s hard to trust again when you’ve got so many reasons not to. Caring about someone is scary; it’s even scarier when you already know how much it hurts to lose them. Sometimes...” He paused to take a deep breath. “Sometimes being alone feels safer than taking the risk of going through it all again. I get that. I really do.”

His voice was raw and open like a wound. It brought to mind that first awkward lunch they’d shared on her caravan, and the way Rhys had looked at the scar on her neck not with pity or horror but understanding.

“And look, maybe you’re right about me and you,” he continued. “Maybe whatever we had, or—or could’ve had… maybe it is too late. Maybe it is just nostalgia.” 

It sounded as though it pained him to say it. Sasha clenched her jaw so hard it ached. 

“But you and Fiona are different. You’re family. You can work this out. I know you can. More importantly, I know deep down you want to.”

Sasha searched his face the way she had so often in those early days, looking for any sign of dishonesty or suspicion and coming up empty-handed. 

“You act like you know me so well,” said Sasha, a rough whisper, “but you’ve been gone for so long…”

Rhys didn’t waver. “Then tell me I’m wrong.”

Sasha said nothing. His eyes—earnest and focused and kind—held steady with hers, and it was like he’d shone a flashlight into every dark nook and cranny inside of her, illuminating all the shadowy corridors she’d roped off year after year. 

Feeling that had been percolating for days boiled over. She stretched to the top of her toes, put a hand at the back of his neck and kissed him. 

Rhys’ shock lasted only a second—then the tension in his neck released, his hand gripped her shoulder tightly, and he leaned down to help bridge the space between them. As Sasha wrapped her fingers in the hair at the back of his neck, cool metal fingertips brushed her hip—

Then Rhys broke away. He backed up until he hit the wobbly dresser, eyes wide and cheeks flushed.

“I—I can’t,” he stammered, shaking his head. “I’m sorry, I…” He struggled to put it into words, chrome hand gesturing uselessly. 

“But you…” Confusion dulled the sting of rejection. “I thought you liked me.”

Rhys laughed, high-pitched and borderline hysterical. 

“That’s just it.” For another moment he floundered for while Sasha watched. “I don’t want to be a—a fling, or—or a spur-of-the-moment decision you regret an hour, a day, a week from now. It’s not fair.” His smile was sad. “I like you too much.” 

Oh. 

Realization came hand-in-hand with relief. “A fling isn’t exactly what I had in mind.” 

Rhys looked down, deep lines of conflict creasing his forehead, tugging at the corners of his lips. 

“You don’t mean that,” he said quietly. “You’ll get scared, or you’ll change your mind, and I—I can’t do that. Not again.”

Seized by a combination of guilt and affection, Sasha’s heart clenched. 

“Rhys.” She stepped towards him, adopting a small but encouraging smile. “I’m sorry about before. You’re right, I got scared. I was scared you were only interested in a ghost and I was scared that once you saw me clearly… you wouldn’t want me anymore.” She reached out, tracing her fingertips over the back of his hand. “But I think maybe you have a point. Maybe I _should_ stop hiding from the things that might make me happy.” 

Rhys’ worried frown deepened, but he turned up his palm, lacing his long fingers through hers. “Are you sure?”

“Promise.” She touched the underside of his chin, guiding his head up until his eyes met hers, and then she smiled. “Think I’ve waited long enough.”

Rhys regarded her with keen, narrowed eyes, and said nothing. 

Sasha’s heart lodged itself in her throat. With every second of inaction that followed, it beat faster, an early prickle of anxiety creeping up her spine. The gravity of what she’d said tugged her out of the clouds and back into orbit. What was she thinking? She was showing her hand, every card she’d kept close to her chest for the better part of a decade—

Then he surged forward, lips crashing against hers, and the anxiety vanished, crushed like an old cigarette under her heel.

Rhys kissed like a starving man who’d found a feast, eager and unleashed. The strong prosthetic arm snaked around her hips while his other hand brushed across her undercut to grip the back of her head. Energized and electrified, Sasha responded in kind, holding him close with fistfuls of his shirt and hair.

“This means you’re…” He struggled to get the words out when he broke away for a breath. “You’re gonna talk to Fiona, right?”

She groaned. “If I say yes, do you promise to never bring up my sister again while we’re making out?”

“Deal.”

In the course of a lifetime, Sasha’d had her share of hurried trysts, rushed connections in bar bathrooms or empty alleyways or anonymous bedrooms she never saw a second time. Encounters as simple as they were temporary, characterized by impatient hands and impersonal words and sometimes-unsatisfying endings. Even with August, familiarity was a different beast than intimacy. 

But this was more than that. She’d promised Rhys more than that. The knowledge of it sparked like a firecracker in her chest, casting a new light on every touch. 

Rhys’ head tilted to the side as Sasha nipped at his earlobe, his breath hot against her bare shoulder. When her tongue traced along the lines on his neck, he let out a whine and gripped her hip so tight it almost hurt.

“God,” he muttered, voice rough as Sasha sucked a bullseye bruise in the centre of his tattoo. “Not to sound gross, but I’ve thought about this for a long time.”

She grinned against his skin. “Not as long as I have.” 

Rhys made a contented noise, the sound of it vibrating pleasantly through his chest. Maneuvering around him, she cleared the dresser with a sweep of her arm, winked, and sat on top of it.

Kissing was much easier when their heads were the same height. She looped her legs around his waist to haul him closer, and when his hand slid up and around her thigh to cup the curve of her ass, Sasha moaned encouragement until he squeezed. They were as flush together as space would allow, and it still wasn’t enough.

Rhys broke the kiss first, breathing heavy as he rested his forehead against hers. “Should…” He stopped to suck in a breath. “Should we slow down?”

Reluctantly, Sasha leaned back. Her fingers stilled in their quest to destroy his hairstyle. “Do you want to?”

“I mean…” Rhys considered it, then shook his head. “No. Not particularly.”

A wicked smile spread across her face. “Well, good.” The flush in his cheeks gave her an unreasonable sense of accomplishment. “Me neither.” 

“All right, then.” He grinned, too, and something in it made her quick pulse even quicker. “Super glad I had a shower earlier.”

Sasha chuckled. “That makes two of us.” She ground her hips into him, searching for some friction while she worked away at his buttons. “Glad you ditched some of those layers, I…” She trailed off as she pushed open his shirt, eyes widening. “You’re kidding me.”

An expanse of blue ink stretched from the base of his neck, across his pec and over his shoulder where it disappeared under his sleeve.

He preened. “You like it?” 

“I can’t believe you don’t show this off,” she muttered. 

“What, and miss this look on your face?” Rhys was dangerously smug as he tapped the tip of her nose.

Sasha ignored him. With the patience of a spoilt child receiving a birthday gift, she pulled his shirt the rest of the way off. The tattoo ran all the way down to his wrist. 

“Y’know, I spent years wondering what the rest of this tattoo looked like.” She followed the pattern with her nails. “Wasn’t even close.”

“Years, huh?” With an expression both staggered and self-satisfied, Rhys threw his head back and whistled low. “Holy crap. Need to build a time machine so I can go tell 21-year-old Rhys those four months of excruciating six-hour sessions are totally gonna pay dividends one day.”

“ _That’s_ what you want a time machine for?” Before he could answer, she pinched his left nipple—an island of pale pink in a sea of blue. “You missed a spot.”

He glared. “Okay, you know what, unless yours are tattooed, you don’t get to comment.”

She raised a challenging eyebrow. “Why don’t you find out?”

Rhys didn’t need telling twice. Both his hands slid up her sides, the cool prosthetic sending a pleasant chill down her spine. She wriggled out of the crop top as he pulled it over her head and let it join the rest of her discarded clothes. 

A flare of self-consciousness rose up as the air hit her bare skin, but it was extinguished quickly by the hungry look in Rhys’ wide eyes. 

“Wow.” He clucked his tongue. “Hypocrite.”

Her laugh was cut short by a sharp intake of breath as his hands cupped her breasts and gave both an experimental squeeze. Goosebumps sprang up where he touched, and another shiver ricocheted through her nervous system. One thumb traced gentle circles around her nipple; the other pinched.

The dresser thumped against the wall as Sasha arched backwards. 

“Which one do you like better?” he asked.

Her brain took a second to parse the question and even longer to formulate an answer. The prosthetic was uniquely smooth and the cold chrome was refreshing, but his other hand was warm and soft, the way she always thought of him—

“Right,” she said, a little embarrassed by how rough it came out. “Wait. No. Left. I mean—my right, your left—”

In another scenario, Rhys’ arrogant chuckle might have been infuriating. He let his metal hand fall away, replaced it with his mouth, and Sasha moaned.

“Shit.” She grabbed his hair with one hand and used the other to brace herself on the dresser. Her head was at an awkward angle against the wall, but the mild discomfort was lost in the cacophony of more pleasurable sensations—his fingers and his tongue and his teeth, the bare skin of his torso between her legs. She ground her hips forward as best as she could. “Shit, I…”

No other words came to mind. Rhys laughed into her chest. 

What a bastard. 

While he sucked a hickey onto the top of her breast, his free hand crept up her side, over her shoulder, ‘til it reached her neck and the knot of her handkerchief—

Sasha’s half-lidded eyes flew open and she grabbed his wrist. 

Rhys pulled his head up immediately, his hand suspended where she’d caught it, a question splashed across his face. 

“It’s, um.” She cleared her throat, trying to sound casual. Her cheeks burned. “It… doesn’t look very nice.”

“I don’t mind what it looks like,” he said quietly.

But he gave her more space, and Sasha straightened up, staring down at her lap as the wildfire of embarrassment spread across her cheeks. 

This was stupid. Plenty of people had seen her scar before. Most of them barely paid attention to it. Scars were a fact of life on Pandora, too commonplace to be a point of intrigue or disgust. Lost a fight with a stalker? Big deal—who hadn’t?

Rhys was different. He knew what it meant, even if he hadn’t been there to see it happen. He would know—

“Sash. Hey.” His warm hand brushed the shaved side of her head, gentle and soothing. “Keep it on if you want. It’s okay.”

Reluctant, she forced herself to meet his eyes. Rhys always looked as though he could see right through her. It ought to make her feel exposed, vulnerable, naked—

Instead, it made her feel safe. 

She could get addicted to that.

A tidal wave crashed over her, one that made her want to laugh and cry in equal measure. She waited for it to break, and then she took a deep breath. 

“No,” she told him, shaky but decisive, “it’s fine. Go ahead.” 

He didn’t move. “You sure?” 

“Yeah.” She guided his hands to the handkerchief. “Yeah, I want you to.”

Rhys nodded as though he’d been granted a very serious task. His fingers worked the knot, and then—so easily it felt anticlimactic—he pulled the handkerchief away. 

His eyes widened.

The glimpse she’d shown him in the caravan left some things to the imagination. Up close, he’d be able to see the full span of it, all the way down to her sternum, wider the lower it got. 

“Told you it was ugly,” said Sasha, trying for a joke and flubbing the landing.

“You’re beautiful,” Rhys countered breezily, like it was obvious enough to be an afterthought. “It’s just…” His fingers hovered over the scar without touching, a thoughtful line on his forehead. “All that pain…”

Shy at the scrutiny, she shrugged. “I barely remember the pain, actually; I passed out.”

He frowned. “Not what I meant.” 

To her relief, he chose to plant a series of kisses along her scar rather than elaborate, each one melting the tension in her shoulders. His hands moved to her thighs, and the handkerchief fell to the floor with the rest of her clothes. 

“I missed you,” she whispered. 

The stray thought escaped before she could think better of it, so softly he might not have heard it at all—except then he was kissing her properly again, his eager tongue against hers. She ran her hands through his hair, ruffling and tugging. When her thumb caught the edge of the port on his temple, he groaned.

“You like that, huh?” She did it a second time, and his whole body shuddered, the metal hand spasming on her thigh. 

“Easy,” he chided, so Sasha filed the information away for later investigation. He pulled her closer to the edge of the dresser, his left hand moving up and over until it was sliding under the waistband of her pants, his long fingers exploring until—

“Fuck,” she gasped, breathless. She nearly fell off the dresser as she squirmed closer to his touch. She tried to return the favour, but he was out of reach. “Fuck, Rhys, I want—”

“Me too,” he agreed. 

His fingers rubbed maddening circles while his free hand fumbled to undo his belt. She clung to his shoulders, nails biting into his skin, bucking against his hand. The dresser thumped against the wall again.

“We’re gonna break this damn thing,” Sasha muttered—though truthfully she was having trouble caring about anything beyond Rhys’ dexterity. 

“Whatever,” Rhys reasoned, “August already hates me anyway.” He wedged his prosthetic hand underneath her and lifted her up. “But hey, check it: robot arm’s still good for something.”

With her legs wrapped around his waist, Rhys half-walked, half-stumbled the both of them over to the bed, and Sasha laughed. She was still laughing when he threw her onto the sheets, and she kept laughing when Rhys tripped stepping out of his pants and braced himself on the mattress. 

“You know, instead of laughing at me, you could help,” he whined, scowling at her harmlessly as he kicked off his last pant leg. 

“Nah, this way is more fun,” she teased. Excitement coiled tight in her belly as he finally undressed, and she made a show of running her tongue across her lips. “Chop chop.”

“Jeeze, I have to do everything around here.”

He stood at the end of the bed to unbutton her pants and tug them down. Sasha wriggled to help him out, her heart lighter than it had in… how long, exactly? 

Unbidden, she remembered fighting the Traveler. How the pain of a broken arm had been nothing when she was being crushed by a hug from every direction. How she’d dug through piles of rare guns while dreaming of ways to spend her second lease on life, blissfully unaware of all she was about to lose—

But then Rhys climbed between her legs, kissing the inside of her thigh, and she let it all go. For the first time in what felt like an eternity, she relaxed and focused on the present, twelve years into an improbable future.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Easily the steamiest thing I've ever attempted to write, so hopefully it wasn't a disaster. We're approaching the climax of this fic now, so there'll be 2-3 chapters left, maybe an epilogue... as you may have noticed I chronically underestimate how many words it'll take me to tell a story. 
> 
> This chapter breaks 50k and 50+ subscribers! An arbitrary milestone, but a milestone. 
> 
> Thanks everyone for the support thus far, I've been having a blast writing it. As always I welcome any comments, here or if you choose over on Tumblr where I'm [@oodlyenough](https://oodlyenough.tumblr.com/tagged/anachronism).

**Author's Note:**

> It was only a matter of time until I tried a "what happened after the Vault" piece, I guess. After pondering this premise for probably more than a year, I think things have settled into place enough for me to give it a whirl. Fingers crossed. 
> 
> You are welcome to come say hi on Tumblr: [@oodlyenough](http://oodlyenough.tumblr.com/)!


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